salvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old scheme
for a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act plays
which make up _Emperor and Galilean_. He tells us that it is the first
work which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that it
contains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demanded
of me so long.' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirely
realistic work,' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual life
which I am putting into this book ... and the historical subject chosen
has a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own time
than one might at first imagine.' How great a relief it must have been,
after the beer and sausages of _The League of Youth_, to go back to an
old cool wine, no one can read _Emperor and Galilean_ and doubt. It is a
relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on
one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like
a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial,
the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against
his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the
Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever
_Peer Gynt_ was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the book
is or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw a
fragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried to
reproduce what I saw.' But in the play itself this intention comes and
goes; and, while some of it reminds one of _Salammbô_ in its attempt to
treat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to the
exposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance,
after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers of
historical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideas
more fundamental than anything in _The League of Youth_; but, as in
almost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point,
satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is not
yet, as the later irony is to be, a deepening, and thus a
justification, of the realism.
Eight years passed between _The League of Youth_ and _The Pillars of
Society_; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has made
for itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; the
mechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a more
conventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place of
satire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concerned
with society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusation
against society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling of
a lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be saying
to us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools of
society. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here is
your respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father and
your mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of heredity
whispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hidden
behind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world.
Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that _Ghosts_
'preaches nothing at all.' This pursuit of truth to its most secret
hiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogma
visibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogma
is terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless,
we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I would
take _A Doll's House_, _Ghosts_, and _The Wild Duck_ as Ibsen's three
central plays, the plays in which his method completely attained its
end, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; and
this work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, is
alive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done
in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, _An Enemy of
the People_, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had
attacked _Ghosts_ for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an
allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of
allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission.
Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people
who suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies,
are terribly alive. _A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in
which the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfected
his art of illusion; beyond _A Doll's House_ and _Ghosts_ dramatic
illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these
living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony
of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles,
but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet.
For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic
element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so
sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With _The
Wild Duck_ fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit
symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is
more disinterested than even in _Ghosts_, for it turns back on the
reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the
pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays
which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the
poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of
the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination.
The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and is
discontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He would
extend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to be
extended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in
_The Wild Duck_ passes, in _Rosmersholm_, in which the problems of
_Love's Comedy_ are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form,
not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In _The Lady from the
Sea_, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Is
it not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Is
it not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality and
giving us no spiritual reality in its place?
_Hedda Gabler_ is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:
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
certain of the social conditions and principles of the present
day.'
The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of
'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and
overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was
actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a
poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom
Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to
add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and
inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief
catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in _The Master-builder_ it is
'harps in the air'; in _Little Eyolf_ it takes human form and becomes
the Rat-wife; in _John Gabriel Borkman_ it drops to the tag of 'a dead
man and two shadows'; in _When we Dead Awaken_ there is nothing but icy
allegory. All that queer excitement of _The Master-builder_, that
'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the
younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself
at home there? is it not rather _Peer Gynt_ back again, and the ride
through the air on the back of the reindeer?
In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he
had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he
turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life
interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial
irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental
artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The
man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back,
though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife
in _Little Eyolf_; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination,
neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a
supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In _John Gabriel
Borkman_, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a
play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no
longer content to concern himself with the old material, lies or
misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but will
have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In _When
we Dead Awaken_ all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a
kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look
their parts.
In these last plays, with their many splendid qualities, not bound
together and concentrated as in _Ghosts_, we see the revenge of the
imagination upon the realist, who has come to be no longer interested in
the action of society upon the individual, but in the individual as a
soul to be lost or saved. The man of science has discovered the soul,
and does not altogether know what to do with it. He has settled its
limits, set it to work in space and time, laid bare some of its secrets,
shown its 'physical basis.' And now certain eccentricities in it begin
to beckon to him; he would follow the soul into the darkness, but it is
dark to him; he can but strain after it as it flutters. In the preface
to the collected edition of his plays, published in 1901, Maeterlinck
has pointed out, as one still standing at the cross-roads might point
out to those who have followed him so far on his way, the great
uncertainty in which the poet, the dramatist of to-day, finds himself,
as what seems to be known or conjectured of 'the laws of nature' is
forced upon him, making the old, magnificently dramatic opportunities of
the ideas of fate, of eternal justice, no longer possible for him to
use.
_Le poète dramatique est obligé de faire descendre dans la vie
réelle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'idée qu'il se fait de
l'inconnu. Il faut qu'il nous montre de quelle façon, sous quelle
forme, dans quelles conditions, d'après quelles lois, à quelle fin,
agissent sur nos destinées les puissances supérieures, les
influences inintelligibles, les principes infinis, dont, en tant
que poète, il est persuadé que l'univers est plein. Et comme il est
arrivé à une heure où loyalement il lui est à peu près impossible
d'admettre les anciennes, et où celles qui les doivent remplacer ne
sont pas encore déterminées, n'ont pas encore de nom, il hésite,
tâtonne, et s'il veut rester absolument sincère, il n'ose plus se
risquer hors de la réalité immédiate. Il se borne à étudier les
sentiments humains dans leurs effets matériels et psychologiques._
So long as Ibsen does this, he achieves great and solid things; and in
_Ghosts_ a scientific dogma, the law or theory of heredity, has for once
taken the place of fate, and almost persuaded us that science, if it
takes poetry from us, can restore to us a kind of poetry. But, as
Maeterlinck has seen, as it is impossible not to see,
_quand Ibsen, dans d'autres drames, essaie de relier à d'autres
mystères les gestes de ses hommes en mal de conscience
exceptionelle ou de ses femmes hallucinées, il faut convenir que,
si l'atmosphère qu'il parvient à créer est étrange et troublante,
elle est rarement saine et respirable, parce qu'elle est rarement
raisonnable et réele._
From the time when, in _A Doll's House_, Ibsen's puppets came to life,
they have refused ever since to be put back into their boxes. The
manager may play what tricks with them he pleases, but he cannot get
them back into their boxes. They are alive, and they live with a weird,
spectacular, but irrevocable life. But, after the last play of all, the
dramatic epilogue, _When we Dead Awaken_, the puppets have gone back
into their boxes. Now they have come to obey the manager, and to make
mysterious gestures which they do not understand, and to speak in images
and take them for literal truths. Even their spectral life has gone out
of them; they are rigid now, and only the strings set them dancing. The
puppets had come to life, they had lived the actual life of the earth;
and then a desire of the impossible, the desire of a life rarefied
beyond human limits, took their human life from them, and they were
puppets again. The epilogue to the plays is the apostasy of the man of
science, and, as with all apostates, his new faith is not a vital thing;
the poet was not really there to reawaken.
Before Ibsen the drama was a part of poetry; Ibsen has made it prose.
All drama up to Ibsen had been romantic; Ibsen made it science. Until
Ibsen no playwright had ever tried to imitate life on the stage, or
even, as Ibsen does, to interpret it critically. The desire of every
dramatist had been to create over again a more abundant life, and to
create it through poetry or through humour; through some form, that is,
of the imagination. There was a time when Ibsen too would have made
poetry of the drama; there was a time when verse seemed to him the only
adequate form in which drama could be written. But his power to work in
poetry was not equal to his desire to be a poet; and, when he revolted
against verse and deliberately adopted as his material 'the common order
of things,' when he set himself, for the first time in the history of
the drama, to produce an illusion of reality rather than a translation
or transfiguration of reality, he discovered his own strength, the
special gift which he had brought into the world; but at the same time
he set, for himself and for his age, his own limits to drama.
It is quite possible to write poetic drama in prose, though to use prose
rather than verse is to write with the left hand rather than with the
right. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and no
great dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama.
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or a
side-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Molière had
used prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself a
good craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarily
dependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama.
Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry;
think, I will not say of Molière, but of Congreve. What is more romantic
than _The Way of the World_? But Ibsen extracts the romantic quality
from drama as if it were a poison; and, in deciding to write
realistically in prose, he gives up every aim but that which he defines,
so early as 1874, as the wish 'to produce the impression on the reader
that what he was reading was something that had really happened.' He is
not even speaking of the effect in a theatre; he is defining his aim
inside the covers of a book, his whole conception of drama.
The art of imitation has never been carried further than it has been
carried by Ibsen in his central plays; and with him, at his best, it is
no mere imitation but a critical interpretation of life. How greatly
this can be done, how greatly Ibsen has done it, there is _Ghosts_ to
show us. Yet at what point this supreme criticism may stop, what remains
beyond it in the treatment of the vilest contemporary material, we shall
see if we turn to a play which seems at first sight more grossly
realistic than the most realistic play of Ibsen--Tolstoi's _Powers of
Darkness_. Though, as one reads and sees it, the pity and fear seem to
weigh almost intolerably upon one, the impression left upon the mind
when the reading or the performance is over, is that left by the hearing
of noble and tragic music. How, out of such human discords, such a
divine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret of
Tolstoi's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achieved
in terms of naked horror, we find some of the things which Maeterlinck
has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through
forms of vague beauty. And we find also another kind of achievement, by
the side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seem a little
trivial or a little unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on
the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of
that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us, as in no other modern play,
by an awful sincerity and an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoi
has learned by instinct some stagecraft which playwrights have been
toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has
supplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, out
of some creative abundance which has taken the dregs of human life up
into itself and transfigured them by that pity which is understanding,
by that faith which is creation, Tolstoi has in this play done what
Ibsen has never done--given us an interpretation of life which owes
nothing to science, nothing to the prose conception of life, but which,
in spite of its form, is essential poetry.
Ibsen's concern is with character; and no playwright has created a more
probable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and so
completely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently so
unconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we would
about real people, and sometimes take sides with them against their
creator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know all
their tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, their
habits, the things that a novelist spends so much of his time in
bringing laboriously before us. Ibsen, in a single stage direction,
gives you more than you would find in a chapter of a novel. His
characters, when they are most themselves, are modern, of the day or
moment; they are average, and represent nothing which we have not met
with, nothing which astonishes us because it is of a nobility, a
heroism, a wildness beyond our acquaintance. It is for this that he has
been most praised; and there is something marvellous in the precision of
his measurements of just so much and no more of the soul.
Yet there are no great characters in Ibsen; and do not great characters
still exist? Ibsen's exceptional people never authenticate themselves as
being greatly exceptional; their genius is vouched for on a report which
they are themselves unable to confirm, as in the inarticulate poet
Lövborg, or on their own assertion, as with John Gabriel Borkman, of
whom even Dr. Brandes admits, 'His own words do not convince me, for
one, that he has ever possessed true genius.' When he is most himself,
when he has the firmest hold on his material, Ibsen limits himself to
that part of the soul which he and science know. By taking the average
man as his hero, by having no hero, no villain, only probable levels, by
limiting human nature to the bounds within which he can clinically
examine it, he shirks, for the most part, the greatest crisis of the
soul. Can the greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimate
issues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and with
Oedipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; it
is universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetes
cries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that little
segment of the world which we call society; its laws are not those of
nature, its requirements are not the requirements of God or of man; it
is a business association for the capture and division of profits; it
is, in short, a fit subject for scientific study, but no longer a part
of the material of poetry. The characteristic plays of Ibsen are rightly
known as 'social dramas.' Their problem, for the main part, is no longer
man in the world, but man in society. That is why they have no
atmosphere, no background, but are carefully localised.
The rhythm of prose is physiological; the rhythm of poetry is musical.
There is in every play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is
the physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare
speaks to the blood like wine or music; it is with exultation, with
intoxication, that we see or read _Antony and Cleopatra_, or even
_Richard II_. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a
diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the
purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. These people who are seen
so clearly, moving about in a well-realised world, using probable words
and doing necessary things, may owe some of their manner at least to the
modern French stage, and to the pamphleteer's prose world of Dumas
_fils_; yet, though they may illustrate problems, they no longer recite
them. They are seen, not as the poet sees his people, naked against a
great darkness, but clothed and contemporary, from the level of an
ironical observer who sits in a corner of the same room. It is the
doctor who sits there, watching his patients, and smiling ambiguously as
he infers from his knowledge of their bodies what pranks their souls are
likely to play.
If Ibsen gets no other kind of beauty, does he not get beauty of
emotion? Or can there be beauty in an intensity of emotion which can be
at least approached, in the power of thrilling, by an Adelphi
melodrama? Is the speech of his people, when it is most nearly a
revelation of the obscure forces outside us or within us, more than a
stammering of those to whom unconsciousness does not lend distinction
but intensifies idiosyncrasy? Drama, in its essence, requires no speech;
it can be played by marionettes, or in dumb show, and be enthralling.
But, speech once admitted, must not that speech, if it is to collaborate
in supreme drama, be filled with imagination, be itself a beautiful
thing? To Ibsen beauty has always been of the nature of an ornament, not
an end. He would concentrate it into a catchword, repeated until it has
lost all emotional significance. For the rest, his speech is the
language of the newspaper, recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph.
Its whole aim is at economy, as if economy were an end rather than a
means.
Has not Ibsen, in the social dramas, tried to make poems without words?
There is to be beauty of motive and beauty of emotion; but the words are
to be the plainest of all the plain words which we use in talking with
one another, and nothing in them is to speak greatly when great
occasions arise. Men's speech in great drama is as much higher than the
words they would use in real life as their thoughts are higher than
those words. It says the unuttered part of our speech. Ibsen would
suppress all this heightening as he has suppressed the soliloquy and the
aside. But here what he suppresses is not a convention but a means of
interpretation. It is suppressing the essence for the sake of the
accident.
Ibsen's genius for the invention of a situation has never been
surpassed. More living characters than the characters of Ibsen have
never moved on the stage. His women are at work now in the world,
interpreting women to themselves, helping to make the women of the
future. He has peopled a new world. But the inhabitants of this new
world, before they begin to transgress its laws and so lose their own
citizenship there, are so faithfully copied from the people about us
that they share their dumbness, that dumbness to which it is the power
and privilege of poetry to give speech. Given the character and the
situation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is: What would this
man be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the most
deeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies all
the difference between prose and poetry.
1906.
JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS