This old man with the head and hair of an electrified Schopenhauer
and the torso of a giant, his temperament coinciding with his curt,
imperious name, left behind him twenty-six plays, one or more in
manuscript. A volume of very subjective poems concludes this long
list; among the dramas are at least three of heroic proportion and
length. Ibsen was born at Skien, Norway, 1828. His forebears were
Danish, German, Scotch, and Norwegian. His father, a man of means,
failed in business, and at the age of eight the little Henrik had to
face poverty. His schooling was of the slightest. He was not much
of a classical scholar and soon he was apprenticed to an apothecary
at Grimstad, the very name of which evokes a vision of gloominess.
He did not prove a success as a druggist, as he spent his spare
time reading and caricaturing his neighbours. His verse-making was
desultory, his accustomed mien an unhappy combination of Hamlet and
Byron; his misanthropy at this period recalls that of the young
Schopenhauer. His favourite reading was poetry and history, and he had
a predilection for sketching and conjuring tricks. It might be pointed
out that here in the raw were the aptitudes of a future dramatist:
poetry, pictures, illusion. In the year 1850 Ibsen published his
first drama, derived from poring over Sallust and Cicero. It was a
creditable effort of youth, and to the discerning it promised well for
his literary future. He was gifted, without doubt, and from the first
he sounded the tocsin of revolt. Pessimistic and rebellious his poems
were; he had tasted misery, his home was an unhappy one--there was
little love in it for him--and his earliest memories were clustered
about the town jail, the hospital, and the lunatic asylum. These
images were no doubt the cause of his bitter and desperate frame of
mind; grinding poverty, the poverty of a third-rate provincial town
in Norway, was the climax of his misery. And then, too, the scenery,
rugged and noble, and the climate, depressing for months, all had
their effect upon his sensitive imagination. From the start, certain
conceptions of woman took root in his mind and reappear in nearly all
his dramas. Catalina's wife, Aurelia, and the vestal Furia, who are
reincarnated in the Dagny and Hjordis of his Vikings, reappear in A
Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and at the last in When We Dead Awake. One
is the eternal womanly, the others the destructive feminine principle,
woman the conqueror. As Catalina is a rebel against circumstances, so
are Maja and the sculptor in the Epilogue of 1899. There is almost
a half century of uninterrupted composition during which this group
of men and women disport themselves. Brand, a poetic rather than an
acting drama, is no exception; Brand and the Sheriff, Agnes and Gerda.
These types are cunningly varied, their traits so concealed as to be
recognised only after careful study. But the characteristics of each
are alike. The monotony of this procedure is redeemed by the unity
of conception--Ibsen is the reflective poet, the poet who conceives
the idea and then clothes it, therein differing from Shakespeare and
Goethe, to whom form and idea are simultaneously born.
In March, 1850, he went to Christiania and entered Heltberg's school
as a preparation for the university. His studies were brief. He became
involved in a boyish revolutionary outburst--in company with his
life-long friend, the good-hearted Björnstjerne Björnson, who helped
him many times--and while nothing serious occurred, it caused the
young man to effervesce with literary plans and the new ideas of his
times. The Warrior's Tomb, his second play, was accepted and actually
performed at the Christiania theatre. The author gave up his university
dreams and began to earn a rude living by his pen. He embarked in
newspaper enterprises which failed. An extremist politically, he soon
made a crop of enemies, the wisest crop a strong character can raise;
but he often worked on an empty stomach in consequence. The metal of
the man showed from the first: endure defeat, but no compromise!
He went to Bergen in 1851 and was appointed theatre poet at a small
salary; this comprised a travelling stipend. Ibsen saw the Copenhagen
and Dresden theatres with excellent results. His eyes were opened to
the possibilities of his craft, and on his return he proved a zealous
stage manager. He composed, in 1853, St. John's Night, which was played
at his theatre, and in 1857 Fru Inger of Oesträtt was written. It is
old-fashioned in form, but singularly lifelike in characterization and
fruitful in situations. The story is semi-historical. In the Lady Inger
we see a foreshadowing of his strong, vengeful women. Olaf Liljekrans
need not detain us. The Vikings (1858) is a sterling specimen of
drama, in which legend and history are artfully blended. The Feast of
Solhaug (1857) was very successful in its treatment of the saga, and is
comparatively cheerful.
Ibsen left Bergen to take the position of director at the Norwegian
Theatre, Christiania. He remained there until 1862, staging all
manner of plays, from Shakespeare to Scribe. The value of these years
was incalculable in his technical development. A poet born and by
self-discipline developed, he was now master of a difficult art, an
art that later he never lost, even when, weary of the conventional
comedy of manners, he sought to spiritualize the form and give us the
psychology of commonplace souls. It may be noted that, despite the
violinist Ole Bull's generous support, the new theatre endured only
five years. More than passing stress should be laid upon this formative
period. His experience of these silent years was bitter, but rich
in spiritual recompense. After some difficulty in securing a paltry
pension from his government, Ibsen was enabled to leave Norway, which
had become a charnel-house to him since the Danish war with Germany,
and with his young wife he went to Rome. Thenceforth his was a gypsy
career. He lived in Rome, in Dresden, in Munich, and again in Rome. He
spent his summers in the Austrian Tyrol, at Sorrento, and occasionally
in his own land. His was a self-imposed exile, and he did not return
to Christiania to reside permanently until an old, but famous man.
Silent, unsociable, a man of harsh moods, he was to those who knew him
an upright character, an ideal husband and father. His married life had
no history, a sure sign of happiness, for he was well mated. Yet one
feels that, despite his wealth, his renown, existence was for him a
_via dolorosa_. Ever the solitary dreamer, he wrote a play about every
two or three years, and from the very beginning of his exile the effect
in Norway was like unto the explosion of a bomb-shell. Not wasting time
in answering his critics, it was nevertheless remarked that each new
piece was a veiled reply to slanderous criticism. Ghosts was absolutely
intended as an answer to the attacks upon A Doll's House; here is
what Nora would have become if she had been a dutiful wife, declares
Ibsen, in effect; and we see Mrs. Alving in her motherly agonies. The
counterblast to the criticism of Ghosts was An Enemy of the People; Dr.
Stockman is easily detected as a partial portrait of Ibsen.
Georg Brandes, to whom the poet owes many ideas as well as sound
criticism, said that early in his life a lyric Pegasus had been killed
under Ibsen This striking hint of his sacrifice is supplemented by
a letter in which he compared the education of a poet to that of a
dancing bear. The bear is tied in a brewer's vat and a slow fire is
built under the vat; the wretched animal is then forced to dance. Life
forces the poet to dance by means quite as painful; he dances and
the tears roll down his cheeks all the while. Ibsen forsook poetry
for prose and--the dividing line never to be recrossed is clearly
indicated between Emperor and Galilean and The Pillars of Society--he
bestowed upon his country three specimens of his poetic genius. As
Italy fructified the genius of Goethe, so it touched as with a glowing
coal the lips of the young Northman. Brand, a noble epic, startled and
horrified Norway. In Rome Ibsen regained his equilibrium. He saw his
country and countrymen more sanely, more steadily, though there is a
terrible fund of bitterness in this dramatic poem. The local politics
of Christiania no longer irritated him, and in the hot, beautiful
South he dreamed of the North, of his beloved fiords and mountains, of
ice and avalanche, of troll and saga. Luckily for those who have not
mastered Norwegian, C. H. Herford's translation of Brand exists, and,
while the translator deplores his sins of omission, it is a work--as
are the English versions of the prose plays by William Archer--that
gives one an excellent idea of the original. In Brand (1866) Ibsen is
at his furthest extremity from compromise. This clergyman sacrifices
his mother, his wife, his child, his own life, to a frosty ideal: "All
or nothing." He is implacable in his ire against worldliness, in his
contempt of churchmen that believe in half-way measures. He perishes
on the heights as a voice proclaims, "He is the God of Love." Greatly
imaginative, charged with spiritual spleen and wisdom, Brand at once
placed Ibsen among the mighty.
He followed it with a new Odyssey of his soul, the amazing Peer Gynt
(1867), in which his humour, hitherto a latent quality, his fantasy,
bold invention, and the poetic evocation of the faithful, exquisite
Solveig, are further testimony to his breadth of resource. Peer Gynt
is all that Brand was not: whimsical, worldly, fantastic, weak-willed,
not so vicious as perverse; he is very selfish, one who was to himself
sufficient, therefore a failure. The will, if it frees, may also kill.
It killed the soul of Peer. There are pages of unflagging humour,
poetry, and observation; scene dissolves into scene; Peer travels over
half the earth, is rich, is successful, is poor; and at the end meets
the Button-Moulder, that ironical shadow who tells him what he has
become. We hear the Boyg, the spirit of compromise, with its huge,
deadly, coiling lengths, gruffly bid Peer to "go around." Facts of life
are to be slunk about, never to be faced. Peer comes to harbour in the
arms of his deserted Solveig. The resounding sarcasm, the ferociousness
of the attack on all the idols of the national cavern, raised a storm
in Norway that did not abate for years. Ibsen was again a target for
the bolts of critical and public hatred. Peer Gynt is the Scandinavian
Faust.
Having purged his soul of this perilous stuff, the poet, in 1873,
finished his double drama Emperor and Galilean, not a success
dramatically, but a strong, interesting work for the library, though it
saw the footlights at Berlin, Leipsic, and Christiania. The apostate
Emperor Julian is the protagonist. We discern Ibsen the mystic
philosopher longing for his Third Kingdom.
After a silence of four years The Pillars of Society appeared. Like
its predecessor in the same _genre_, The Young Men's League, it is
a prose drama, a study of manners, and a scathing arraignment of
civic dishonesty. All the rancour of its author against the bourgeois
hypocrisy of his countrymen comes to the surface; as in The Young Men's
League the vacillating nature of the shallow politician is laid bare.
It seems a trifle banal now, though the canvas is large, the figures
animated. One recalls Augier without his Gallic _esprit_, rather than
the later Ibsen. A Doll's House was once a household word, as was
Ghosts (1881). There is no need now to retell the story of either
play. Ghosts, in particular, has an antique quality, the _dénouement_
leaves us shivering. It may be set down as the strongest play of the
nineteenth century, and also the most harrowing. Its intensity borders
on the hallucinatory. We involuntarily recall the last act of Tristan
and Isolde or the final movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic symphony.
It is the shrill discord between the mediocre creatures involved and
the ghastly punishment meted out to the innocent that agitates and
depresses us. Here are human souls illuminated as if by a lightning
flash; we long for the anticipated thunder. It does not sound. The
drama ends in silence--one of those pauses (Ibsen employs the pause
as does a musical composer) which leaves the spectator unstrung. The
helpless sense of hovering about the edge of a bottomless gulf is
engendered by this play. No man could have written it but Ibsen, and we
hope that no man will ever attempt a parallel performance, for such art
modulates across the borderland of the pathologic.
The Wild Duck (1884) followed An Enemy of the People (1882). It is the
most puzzling of the prose dramas except The Master-Builder, for in it
Ibsen deliberately mocks himself and his ideals. It is, nevertheless,
a profoundly human and moving work. Gina Ekdal, the wholesome,
sensible wife of Ekdal, the charlatan photographer--a _revenant_ of
Peer Gynt--has been called a feminine Sancho Panza. Gregers Werle,
the meddlesome truth-teller; Relling--a sardonic incarnation of
the author--who believes in feeding humanity on the "life-lie" to
maintain its courage; the tiny Hedwig, sweetest and freshest of Ibsen's
girls--these form a memorable _ensemble_. And how the piece plays!
Humour and pathos alternate, while the symbol is not so remote that
an average audience need miss its meaning. The end is cruel. Ibsen is
often cruel, with the passionless indifference of the serene Buddha.
But he is ever logical. Nora must leave her husband's house--a "happy
ending" would be ridiculous--and Hedwig must be sacrificed instead of
the wild duck, or her fool of a father. There is a battalion of minor
characters in the Ibsen plays who recall Dickens by their grotesque,
sympathetic physiognomies. To deny this dramatist humour is to miss a
third of his qualities. His is not the ventripotent humour of Rabelais
or Cervantes; it seldom leaves us without the feeling that the poet is
slyly laughing at us, not with us, though in the early comedies there
are many broad and telling strokes.
Rosmersholm (1886) is a study of two temperaments. Rebekka West
is another malevolent portrait in his gallery of dangerous and
antipathetic women. She ruins Rosmersholm, ruins herself, because she
does not discover this true self until too late. The play illustrates
the extraordinary technique of the master. It seems to have been
written backward; until the third act we are not aware that the
peaceful home of the Rosmersholms is the battle-field of a malignant
soul. The Lady from the Sea (1888) illustrates the thesis that love
must be free. The allegory is rather strained and in performance the
play lacks poetic glamour. Hedda Gabler (1890) is a masterpiece. A more
selfish, vicious, cold nature than Hedda's never stepped from the page
of a Russian novel--Becky Sharp and Madame Marneffe are lovable persons
in comparison. She is not in the slightest degree like the stage
"adventuress," but is a magnificent example of egoism magnificently
delineated and is the true sister in fiction of Julien Sorel. That she
is dramatically worth the while is beside the question. Her ending by a
pistol shot is justice itself; alive she fascinates as does some exotic
reptile. She is representative of her species, the loveless woman, the
petty hater, a Lady Macbeth reversed. Ibsen has studied her with the
same care and curiosity he bestowed upon the homely Gina Ekdal.
His Master-Builder (1892) is the beginning of the last cycle. A true
interior drama, we enter here into the region of the symbolical.
With Ibsen the symbol is always an image, never an abstraction, a
state of sensibility, not a formula, and the student may winnow many
examples from The Pretenders (1864), with its "kingship" idea, to the
Epilogue. Solness stands on the heights only to perish, but in the full
possession of his soul. Hilda Wangel is one of the most perplexing
characters to realise in the modern theatre. She, with her cruelty
and loveliness of perfect youth, is the work of a sorcerer who holds
us spellbound while the souls he has created by his black art slowly
betray themselves. It may be said that all this is not the art of
the normal theatre. Very true. It more nearly resembles a dramatic
confessional with a hidden auditory bewitched into listening to secrets
never suspected of the humanity that hedges us about in street or
home. Ibsen is clairvoyant. He takes the most familiar material and
holds it in the light of his imagination; straightway we see a new
world, a northern dance of death, like the ferocious pictures of his
fellow-countryman, the painter Edvard Munch.
Little Eyolf (1894) is fairly plain reading, with some fine overtones
of suffering and self-abnegation. Its lesson is wholly satisfying.
John Gabriel Borkman (1896), written at an age when most poets show
declining power, is another monument to the vigour and genius of Ibsen.
The story winds about the shattered career of a financier. There is a
secondary plot, in which the parental curses come home to roost--the
son, carefully reared to wipe away the stain from his father's name,
prefers Paris and a rollicking life. The desolation under this
roof-tree is almost epical: two sisters in deadly antagonism, a
blasted man, the old wolf, whose footfalls in the chamber above become
absolutely sinister as the play progresses, are made to face the hard
logic of their misspent lives. The doctrine of compensation has never
had such an exponent as Ibsen.
In the last of his published plays, When We Dead Awake (1899), we find
earlier and familiar themes developed at moments with contrapuntal
mastery. Rubek, the sculptor, has aroused a love that he never dared to
face. He married the wrong woman. His early dream, the inspiration of
his master work, he has lost. His art withers. And when he meets his
Irene, her mind is full of wandering ghosts. To the heights, to the
same peaks that Brand climbed, they both must mount, and there they are
destroyed, as was Brand, by an avalanche. Eros is the triumphant god of
the aged magician.