I
One indisputable service has Ibsen rendered to the drama: he has
revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of
a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from
an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the
complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the
final decades of the nineteenth century,--when the novel was despotic in
its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary
expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction like Edmond de Goncourt
did not hesitate to declare that the drama was outworn at last, that it
was unfitted to convey the ideas interesting to the modern world, and
that it had fallen to be no more than a toy to amuse the idle after
dinner,--Ibsen brought forth a succession of social dramas as tho to
prove that the playhouse of our own time could supply a platform whereon
a man might free his soul and boldly deliver his message, if only he
had first mastered the special conditions of the playwright's art. Of
course, Ibsen has solved none of the problems he has propounded; nor was
it his business as a dramatist to provide solutions of the strange
enigmas of life, but rather to force us to exert ourselves to find each
of us the best answer we could.
No one who has followed the history of the theater for the past quarter
of a century can fail to acknowledge that these social plays of Ibsen
have exerted a direct, an immediate and a powerful influence on the
development of the contemporary drama. It is easy to dislike them;
indeed, it is not hard even to detest them; but it is impossible to deny
that they have been a stimulus to the dramatists of every modern
language--and not least to playwrights of various nationalities wholly
out of sympathy with Ibsen's own philosophy. The fascination of these
social dramas may be charmless, as Mr. Henry James once asserted; but
there is no gainsaying the fascination itself. As M. Maeterlinck has
declared, Ibsen is "perhaps the only writer for the stage who has caught
sight of and set in motion, a new, tho still disagreeable, poetry, which
he has succeeded in investing with a kind of savage, gloomy beauty"; and
M. Maeterlinck then questions whether this beauty is not too savage and
too gloomy to become general or definitive. But, none the less, it is
at least beauty, a quality long banished from the stage, when Ibsen
showed how it might be made to bloom there again.
Nor is there any dispute as to the variety and the veracity of the
characters that people these studies from life. Indeed, as Mr. Archer
once pointed out, "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the
compliment (so often paid to Shakspere) of discussing certain of his
female characters as tho they were real women, living lives apart from
the poet's creative intelligence." And in yet another way is Ibsen
treated like Shakspere, in that there is superabundant discussion not
only of his characters, male and female, but also of his moral aim, of
his sociological intention, of his philosophy of life, while very little
attention is paid to his dramaturgic craftsmanship, to his command of
structural beauty, to his surpassing skill in the difficult art of the
play-maker. Yet Shakspere and Ibsen are professional playwrights, both
of them, each making plays adjusted exactly to the conditions of the
theater of his own time; and if the author of 'Othello' can prove
himself (when the spirit moves him) to be a master-technician, so also
can the author of 'Ghosts.'
There is ample recognition of Ibsen as the ardent reformer seeking to
blow away the mists of sentimentality, and of Ibsen, the symbolist,
suggesting dimly a host of things unseen and strangely beautiful; but
there is little consideration of Ibsen's solid workmanship, of his sure
knowledge of all the secrets of the stage, of his marvelous dexterity of
exposition, construction and climax. No doubt, it is as a poet, in the
largest meaning of the word, that Ibsen is most interesting; but he is a
playwright also,--indeed, he is a playwright, first and foremost; and in
that aspect also he is unfailingly interesting. For those who insist
that a poet must be a philosopher, Ibsen is to be ranked with Browning
as affording endless themes for debate; but for those who demand that a
dramatic poet shall be a playwright, Ibsen is a rival of Scribe and of
the younger Dumas and of all the school of accomplished craftsmen in
France who have made Paris the capital of the dramatic art. Ibsen's
skill as a playwright is so consummate that his art is never obtruded.
In fact, it was so adroitly hidden that when he first loomed on the
horizon, careless theatrical critics were tempted rather to deny its
existence. He is such a master of all the tricks of the trade that he
can improve upon them or do without them, as occasion serves; and
perhaps it is only those thoroly familiar with the practises of the
accomplished French playwrights of the nineteenth century who perceive
clearly the superiority of Ibsen in the mere mechanism of the
dramaturgical art.