IBSEN

I

Henrik Ibsen was the best-hated artist of the nineteenth century. The

reason is simple: He was, himself, the arch-hater of his age. Yet,

granting this, the Norwegian dramatist aroused in his contemporaries a

wrath that would have been remarkable even if emanating from the fiery

pit of politics; in the comparatively serene field of æsthetics such

overwhelming attacks from the critics of nearly every European nation

testified to the singular power displayed by this poet. Richard Wagner

was not so abused; the theatre of his early operations was confined to

Germany, the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris a unique exception. Wagner,

too, did everything that was possible to provoke antagonism. He scored

his critics in speech and pamphlet. He gave back as hard names as he

received. Ibsen never answered, either in print or by the mouth of

friends, the outrageous allegations brought against him. Indeed, his

disciples often darkened the issue by their unsolicited, uncritical

championship.

In Edouard Manet, the revolutionary Parisian painter and head of the

so-called impressionist movement--himself not altogether deserving

the appellation--we have an analogous case to Wagner's. Ridicule,

calumny, vituperation, pursued him for many years. But Paris was the

principal scene of his struggles; Paris mocked him, not all Europe.

Even the indignation aroused by Nietzsche was a comparatively local

affair. Wagner is the only man who approaches Ibsen in the massiveness

of his martyrdom. Yet Wagner had consolations for his opponents. His

music-drama, so rich in colour and rhythmic beauty, his romantic

themes, his appeal to the eye, his friendship with Ludwig of Bavaria,

at times placated his fiercest detractors. Manet painted one or two

successes for the official Salon; Nietzsche's brilliant style and

faculty for coining poetic images were acclaimed, his philosophy

declared detestable. Yes, fine phrases may make fine psychologues.

Robert Browning never felt the heavy hand of public opinion as did

Ibsen. We must go back to the days of Byron and Shelley for an example

of such uncontrollable and unanimous condemnation. But, again, Ibsen

tops them all as victim of storms that blew from every quarter:

Norway to Austria, England to Italy, Russia to America. There were no

mitigating circumstances in his _lèse-majesté_ against popular taste.

No musical rhyme, scenic splendour, or rhythmic prose, acted as an

emotional buffer between him and his audiences. His social dramas were

condemned as the sordid, heartless productions of a mediocre poet, who

wittingly debased our moral currency. And as they did not offer as

bribes the amatory intrigue, the witty dialogue, the sensual arabesques

of the French stage, or the stilted rhetoric and heroic postures of the

German, they were assailed from every critical watch-tower in Europe.

Ibsen was a stranger, Ibsen was disdainfully silent, therefore Ibsen

must be annihilated. Possibly if he had, like Wagner, explained his

dramas, we should have had confusion thrice confounded.

The day after his death the entire civilised world wrote of him as the

great man he was: great man, great artist, great moralist. And A Doll's

House only saw the light in 1879--so potent a creator of critical

perspective is Death. There were, naturally, many dissonant opinions

in this symphony of praise. Yet how different it all read from the

opinions of a decade ago. Adverse criticism, especially in America,

was vitiated by the fact that Ibsen the dramatist was hardly known

here. Ibsen was eagerly read, but seldom played; and rarely played as

he should be. He is first the dramatist. His are not closet dramas

to be leisurely digested by lamp-light; conceived for the theatre,

actuality their key-note, his characters are pale abstractions on the

printed page--not to mention the inevitable distortions to be found

in the closest translation. We are all eager to tell what we think of

him. But do we know him? Do we know him as do the goers of Berlin,

or St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Vienna, or Munich? And do we realise

his technical prowess? In almost every city of Europe Ibsen is in the

regular repertory. He is given at intervals with Shakespeare, Schiller,

Dumas, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Grillparzer, Hervieu, Sudermann, and

with the younger dramatists. That is the true test. Not the isolated

divinity of a handful of worshippers, with an esoteric message, his

plays are interpreted by skilled actors and not for the untrained if

enthusiastic amateur. There is no longer Ibsenism on the Continent;

Ibsen is recognised as the greatest dramatist since Racine and Molière.

Cults claim him no more, and therefore the critical point of view at

the time of his death had entirely shifted. His works are played in

every European language and have been translated into the Japanese.

The mixed blood in the veins of Ibsen may account for his temperament;

he was more Danish than Norwegian, and there were German and Scotch

strains in his ancestry. Such obscure forces of heredity doubtless

played a rôle in his career. Norwegian in his love of freedom, Danish

in his artistic bent, his philosophic cast of mind was wholly Teutonic.

Add to these a possible theologic prepossession derived from the

Scotch, a dramatic technique in which Scribe and Sophocles are not

absent, and we have to deal with a disquieting problem. Ibsen was a

mystery to his friends and foes. Hence the avidity with which he is

claimed by idealists, realists, socialists, anarchists, symbolists,

by evangelical folk, and by agnostics. There were in him many

contradictory elements. Denounced as a pessimist, all his great plays

have, notwithstanding, an unmistakable message of hope, from Brand to

When We Dead Awake. An idealist he is, but one who has realised the

futility of dreams; like all world-satirists, he castigates to purify.

His realism is largely a matter of surfaces, and if we care to look

we may find the symbol lodged in the most prosaic of his pieces. His

anarchy consists in a firm adherence to the doctrine of individualism;

Emerson and Thoreau are of his spiritual kin. In both there is the

contempt for mob-rule, mob-opinion; for both the minority is the true

rational unit; and with both there is a certain aloofness from mankind.

Yet we do not denounce Emerson or Thoreau as enemies of the people. To

be candid, Ibsen's belief in the rights of the individual is rather

naïve and antiquated, belonging as it does to the tempestuous period of

'48. Max Stirner was far in advance of the playwright in his political

and menacing egoism; while Nietzsche, who loathed democracy, makes

Ibsen's aristocracy timid by comparison.

Ibsen can hardly be called a philosophic anarch, for the body of

doctrine, either political or moral, deducible from his plays is so

perplexing by reason of its continual affirmation and negation, so

blurred by the kaleidoscopic clash of character, that one can only fuse

these mutually exclusive qualities by realising him as a dramatist

who has created a microcosmic world; in a word, we must look upon the

man as a creator of dramatic character not as a theorist. And his

characters have all the logical illogicality of life.

Several traits emerge from this welter of cross-purposes and action.

Individualism is a leading motive from the first to the last play;

a strong sense of moral responsibility--an oppressive sense, one is

tempted to add--is blended with a curious flavour of Calvinism, in

which are traces of predestination. A more singular equipment for a

modern dramatist is barely conceivable. Soon we discover that Ibsen

is playing with the antique dramatic counters under another name.

Free-will and determinism--what are these but the very breath of

classic tragedy! In one of his rare moments of expansion he said: "Many

things and much upon which my later work has turned--the contradiction

between endowment and desire, between capacity and will, at once the

entire tragedy and comedy of mankind--may here be dimly discerned."

Moral responsibility evaded is a favourite theme of his. No Furies of

the Greek drama pursued their victims with such relentless vengeance as

pursues the unhappy wretches of Ibsen. In Ghosts, the old scriptural

wisdom concerning the sins of parents is vividly expounded, though

the heredity doctrine is sadly overworked. As in other plays of his,

there were false meanings read into the interpretation; the realism of

Ghosts is negligible; the symbol looms large in every scene. Search

Ibsen throughout and it will be found that his subject-matter is

fundamentally the same as that of all great masters of tragedy. It is

his novel manner of presentation, his transposition of themes hitherto

treated epically, to the narrow, unheroic scale of middle-class family

life that blinded critics to his true significance. This tuning down

of the heroic, this reversal of the old æsthetic order extorted bitter

remonstrances. If we kill the ideal in art and life, what have we

left? was the cry. But Ibsen attacks false as well as true ideals and

does not always desert us after stripping us of our self-respect. A

poet of doubt he is, who seldom attempts a solution; but he is also a

puritan--a positivist puritan--and his scourgings are an equivalent for

that _katharsis_, in the absence of which Aristotle denied the title of

tragedy.

Consider, then, how Ibsen was misunderstood. Setting aside the

historical and poetic works, we are confronted in the social plays

by the average man and woman of every-day life. They live, as a

rule, in mediocre circumstances; they are harried by the necessities

of quotidian existence. Has this undistinguished _bourgeoisie_ the

potentialities of romance, of tragedy, of beauty? Wait, says Ibsen, and

you will see your own soul, the souls of the man and woman who jostle

you in the street, the same soul in palace or hovel, that orchestra of

cerebral sensations, the human soul. And it is the truth he speaks. We

follow with growing uneasiness his exposition of a soul. The spectacle

is not pleasing. In his own magical but charmless way the souls of

his people are turned inside out during an evening. No monologues, no

long speeches, no familiar machinery of the drama, are employed. But

the miracle is there. You face yourself. Is it any wonder that public

and critic alike waged war against this showman of souls, this new

psychologist of the unflattering, this past master of disillusionment?

For centuries poets, tragic and comic, satiric and lyric, have been

exalting, teasing, mocking, and lulling mankind. When Aristophanes

flayed his victims he sang a merry tune; Shakespeare, with Olympian

amiability, portrayed saint and sinner alike to the accompaniment of a

divine music. But Ibsen does not cajole, amuse, or bribe with either

just or specious illusions. He is determined to tell the truth of our

microcosmic baseness. The truth is his shibboleth. And when enounced

its sound is not unlike the chanting of a _Nox Irae_. He lifted the

ugly to heroic heights; the ignoble he analysed with the cold ardour of

a moral biologist--the ignoble, that "sublime of the lower slopes," as

Flaubert has it.

This psychological method was another rock of offence. Why transform

the playhouse into a school of metaphysics? But Ibsen is not a

metaphysician and his characters are never abstractions; instead, they

are very lively humans. They offend those who believe the theatre to

be a place of sentimentality or clowning; these same Ibsen men and

women offend the lovers of Shakespeare and the classics. We know they

are real, yet we dislike them as we dislike animals trained to imitate

humanity too closely. The simian gestures cause a feeling of repulsion

in both cases; surely we are not of such stock! And we move away. So

do we sometimes turn from the Ibsen stage when human souls are made to

go through a series of sorrowful evolutions by their stern trainer. To

what purpose such revelations? Is it art? Is not our ideal of a nobler

humanity shaken?

Ibsen's report of the human soul as he sees it is his right, the

immemorial right of priest, prophet, or artist. All our life is a huge

lie if this right be denied; from the Preacher to Schopenhauer, from

Æschylus to Molière, the man who reveals, in parable or as in a mirror,

the soul of his fellow-being is a man who is a benefactor of his kind,

if he be not a cynical spirit that denies. Ibsen is a satirist of a

superior degree; he has the gift of creating a _Weltspiegel_ in which

we see the shape of our souls. He is never the cynic, though he has

portrayed the cynic in his plays. He has too much moral earnestness

to view the world merely as a vile jest. That he is an artist is

acknowledged. And for the ideals dear to us which he so savagely

attacks, he so clears the air about some old familiar, mist-haunted

ideal of duty, that we wonder if we have hitherto mistaken its meaning.

From being denounced as a corrupter of youth, an anarch of letters, a

debaser of current moral coin, we have learned to view him as a force

making for righteousness, as a master of his craft, and as a creator

of a large gallery of remarkably vivid human characters. We know now

that many modern dramatists have carried their pails to this vast

northern lake and from its pine-hemmed and sombre waters have secretly

drawn sparkling inspiration.

The truth is that Ibsen can be no longer denied--we exclude the

wilfully blind--by critic or public. He is too big a man to be locked

up in a library as if he were full of vague forbidden wickedness. When

competently interpreted he is never offensive; the scenes to which the

critics refer as smacking of sex are mildness itself compared to the

doings of Sardou's lascivious marionettes. In the theatrical sense his

are not sex plays, as are those of Dumas the younger. He discusses

woman as a social as well as a psychical problem. Any picture of love

is tolerated so it be frankly sentimental; but let Ibsen mention the

word sex and there is a call to arms by the moral policemen of the

drama. Thus, by some critical hocus-pocus the world was led for years

to believe that this lofty thinker, moralist, and satirist concealed

an immoral teacher. It is an old trick of the enemy to place upon an

author's shoulders the doings and sayings of his mimic people. Ibsen

was fathered with all the sins of his characters. Instead of being

studied from life, they were, so many averred, the result of a morbid

brain, the brain of a pessimist and a hater of his kind.

We have seen that Ibsen offended by his disregard of academic dramatic

attitudes. His personages are ordinary, yet like Browning's meanest

soul they have a human side to show us. The inherent stuff of his plays

is tragic; but the hero and heroine do not stamp, stalk, or spout blank

verse; it is the tragedy of life without the sop of sentiment usually

administered by second-rate poets. Missing the colour and decoration,

the pretty music, and the eternal simper of the sensual, we naturally

turn our back on such a writer. If he knows souls, he certainly

does not understand the box-office. This for the negative side. On

the positive, the apparent baldness of the narrative, the ugliness

of his men and women, their utterance of ideas foreign to cramped,

convention-ridden lives, mortify us immeasurably. The tale always ends

badly or sadly. And when one of his characters begins to talk about the

"joy of life," it is the gloom of life that is evoked. The women--and

here is the shock to our masculine vanity--the women assert themselves

too much, telling men that they are not what they believe themselves

to be. Lastly, the form of the Ibsen play is compact with ideas and

emotion. We usually don't go to the theatre to think or to feel. With

Ibsen we must think, and think closely; we must feel--worse still, be

thrilled to our marrow by the spectacle of our own spiritual skeletons.

No marvellous music is there to heal the wounded nerves as in Tristan

and Isolde; no prophylactic for the merciless acid of the dissector.

We either breathe a rarefied atmosphere in his Brand and in When We

Dead Awake, or else, in the social drama, the air is so dense with

the intensity of the closely wrought moods that we gasp as if in the

chamber of a diving-bell. Human, all too human!

Protean in his mental and spiritual activities, a hater of

shams--religious, political, and social shams--more symbolist

than realist, in assent with Goethe that no material is unfit for

poetic treatment, the substance of Ibsen's morality consists in his

declaration that men to be free must first free themselves. Once, in

addressing a group of Norwegian workmen, he told them that man must

ennoble himself, he must _will_ himself free; "to will is to have

to will," as he says in Emperor and Galilean. Yet in Peer Gynt he

declares "to be oneself is to slay oneself." Surely all this is not

very radical. He wrote to Georg Brandes, that the State was the foe

of the individual; therefore the State must go. But the revolution

must be one of the spirit. Ibsen ever despised socialism, and after

his mortification over the fiasco of the Paris Commune he had never a

good word for that vain legend: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Brandes

relates that while Ibsen wished--in one of his poems--to place a

torpedo under the social ark, there was also a time when he longed to

use the knout on the willing slaves of a despised social system.

Perhaps the main cause of Ibsen's offending is his irony. The

world forgives much, irony never, for irony is the ivory tower of

the intellectual, the last refuge of the original. It is not the

intellectual irony of Meredith, nor the playful irony of Anatole

France, but a veiled corrosive irony that causes you to tread

suspiciously every yard of his dramatic domain. The "second intention,"

the secondary dialogue, spoken of by Maeterlinck, in the Ibsen plays is

very disconcerting to those who prefer their drama free from enigma.

Otherwise his dialogue is a model for future dramatists. It is clarity

itself and, closely woven, it has the characteristic accents of nature.

Read, we feel its gripping logic; spoken by an actor, it tingles with

vitality.

For the student there is a fascination in the cohesiveness of these

dramas. Ibsen's mind was like a lens; it focussed the refracted,

scattered, and broken lights of opinions and theories of his day upon

the contracted space of his stage. In a fluid state the ideas that

crystallised in his prose series are to be found in his earliest work;

there is a remorseless fastening of link to link in the march-like

movement of his plays. Their author seems to delight in battering down

in Ghosts what he had preached in A Doll's House; The Enemy of the

People exalted the individual man, though Ghosts taught that a certain

kind of personal liberty is deadly; The Wild Duck, which follows, is

another puzzle, for in it the misguided idealist is pilloried for

destroying homes by his truth-telling, dangerous tongue; Rosmersholm

follows with its portrayal of lonely souls; and the danger of filling

old bottles with the fermenting wines of new ideas is set forth; in

The Lady from the Sea free-will, the will to love, is lauded, though

Rebekka West and Rosmersholm perished because of their exercise of this

same will; Hedda Gabler shows the converse of Ellida Wangel's "will

to power." Hedda is a creature wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns

us again, for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead your own

life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it leads to a catastrophe which

wrecks a household. This game of contradiction is continued in The

Master-Builder, a most potent exposition of human motives. Solness is

sick-brained because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, the "younger

generation," a Hedda Gabler _à rebours_, that he so feared would come

knocking at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, arouses his

slumbering self; curiously enough, if the ordinary standards of success

be adduced, he goes to his destruction when he again climbs the dizzy

spire. In John Gabriel Borkman the allegory is clearer. Sacrificing

love to a base ambition, to "commercialism," Borkman at the close of

his great and miserable life discovers that he has committed the one

unpardonable offence: he has slain the love-life in the woman he loved,

and for the sake of gold. So he is a failure, and, like Peer Gynt, he

is ready for the Button-Moulder with his refuse-heap, who lies in wait

for all cowardly and incomplete souls. The Epilogue returns to the

mountains, the Ibsen symbol of freedom, and there we learn for the

last time that love is greater than art, that love is life. And the

dead of life awake.

The immorality of these plays is so well concealed that only abnormal

moralists detect it. It may be admitted that Ibsen, like Shakespeare,

manifests a preference for the man who fails. What is new is the art

with which this idea is developed. The Ibsen play begins where other

plays end. The form is the "amplified catastrophe" of Sophocles. After

marriage the curtain is rung up on the true drama of life, therefore

marriage is a theme which constantly preoccupies this modern poet.

He regards it from all sides, asking whether "by self-surrender,

self-realisation may be achieved." His speech delivered once before

a ladies' club at Christiania proves that he is not a champion of

latter-day woman's rights. "The women will solve the question of

mankind, but they must do so as mothers." Yet Nora Helmer, when she

slammed the door of her doll's home, caused an echo in the heart of

every intelligent woman in Christendom. It is not necessary now to ask

whether a woman would, or should, desert her children; Nora's departure

was only the symbol of her liberty, the gesture of a newly awakened

individuality. Ibsen did not preach--as innocent persons of both sexes

and all anti-Ibsenites believe--that woman should throw overboard

her duties; this is an absurd construction. As well argue that the

example of Othello must set jealous husbands smothering their wives.

A Doll's House enacted has caused no more evil than Othello. It was

the plea for woman as a human being, neither more nor less than man,

which the dramatist made. Our withers must have been well wrung, for

it aroused a whirlwind of wrath, and henceforth the house-key became

the symbol of feminine supremacy. Yet in his lovely drama of pity and

resignation, Little Eyolf, the tenderest from his pen, the poet set up

a counter-figure to Nora, demonstrating the duties parents owe their

children.

Without exaggeration, he may be said to have discovered for the stage

the modern woman. No longer the sleek cat of the drawing-room, or the

bayadere of luxury, or the wild outlaw of society, the "emancipated"

Ibsen woman is the sensible woman, the womanly woman, bearing a not

remote resemblance to the old-fashioned woman, who calmly accepts her

share of the burdens and responsibilities of life, single or wedded,

though she insists on her rights as a human being, and without a touch

of the heroic or the supra-sentimental. Ibsen should not be held

responsible for the caricatures of womanhood evolved by his disciples.

When a woman evades her responsibilities, when she is frivolous or

evil, an exponent of the "life-lie" in matrimony, then Ibsen grimly

paints her portrait, and we denounce him as cynical for telling the

truth. And truth is seldom a welcome guest. But he knows that a fiddle

can be mended and a bell not; and in placing his surgeon-like finger

on the sorest spot of our social life, he sounds this bell, and when

it rings cracked he coldly announces the fact. But his attitude toward

marriage is not without its mystery. In Love's Comedy his hero and

heroine part, fearing the inevitable shipwreck in the union of two

poetic hearts without the necessary means of a prosaic subsistence.

In the later plays, marriage for gain, for home, for anything but

love, brings upon its victims the severest consequences; John Gabriel

Borkman, Hedda, Dora, Mrs. Alving, Allmers, Rubek, are examples. The

idea of man's cruelty to man or woman, or woman's cruelty to woman or

man, lashes him into a fury. Then he becomes Ibsen the Berserker.

Therefore let us beware the pitfalls dug by some Ibsen exegetists; the

genius of the dramatist is too vast and versatile to be pinned down to

a single formula. If you believe that he is dangerous to young people,

let it be admitted--but so are Thackeray, Balzac, and Hugo. So is any

strong thinker. Ibsen is a powerful dissolvent for an imagination

clogged by theories of life, low ideals, and the facile materialism

that exalts the letter but slays the spirit. He is a foe to compromise,

a hater of the half-way, the roundabout, the weak-willed, above all,

a hater of the truckling politician--he is a very Torquemada to

politicians. At the best there is ethical grandeur in his conceptions,

and if the moral stress is unduly felt, if he tears asunder the veil

of our beloved illusions and shows us as we are, it is because of his

righteous indignation against the platitudinous hypocrisy of modern

life. His unvarying code is: "So to conduct one's life as to realise

oneself." Withal an artist, not the evangelist of a new gospel, not

the social reformer, not the exponent of science in the drama. These

titles have been thrust upon him by his overheated admirers. He never

posed as a prophet. He is poet, psychologist, skald, dramatist, not

always a soothsayer. The artist in him preserved him from the fate

of the didactic Tolstoy. With the Russian he shares the faculty of

emptying souls. Ibsen, who vaguely recalls Stendhal in his clear-eyed

vision and dry irony, is without a trace of the Frenchman's cynicism

or dilettantism. Like all dramatists of the first rank, the Norwegian

has in him much of the seer, yet he always avoided the pontifical tone;

he may be a sphinx, but he never plays the oracle. His categorical

imperative, however, "All or nothing," does not bear the strain of

experience. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at such an intolerable

tension. The very illusions he seeks to destroy would be supplanted by

others. Man exists because of his illusions. Without the "life-lie" he

would perish in the mire. His illusions are his heritage from aeons

of ancestors. The classic view considered man as the centre of the

universe; that position has been ruthlessly altered by science--we are

now only tiny points of consciousness in unthinkable space. Isolated

then, true children of our inconsiderable planet, we have in us traces

of our predecessors. True, one may be disheartened by the pictures of

unheroic meanness and petty corruption, the ill-disguised instincts

of ape and tiger, in the prose plays, even to the extent of calling

them--as did M. Melchior de Vogüé, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet--a

grotesque Iliad of Nihilism. But we need not despair. If Ibsen seemed

to say for a period, "Evil, be thou my good," his final words in the

Epilogue are those of pity and peace: _Pax vobiscum!_