Altho it is possible to consider his stage-technic apart from his
teaching, it needs to be noted at the outset that Ibsen the playwright
owes a large portion of his power and effectiveness to Ibsen the
poet-philosopher. As it happens, the doctrine of individual
responsibility, which is the core of Ibsen's code, is a doctrine most
helpful to the dramatist. The drama, indeed, differentiates itself from
all other literary forms in that it must deal with a struggle, with a
clash of contending desires, with the naked assertion of the human will.
This is the mainspring of that action without which a drama is a thing
of naught; and perhaps the most obvious backbone for a play is the tense
contest of two human beings, each knowing clearly what he wants and each
straining to attain it, at whatever cost to his adversary, to all
others, and even to himself. Rivals fighting to the death, a hero at war
with the world, a single soul striving to wrench itself free from the
fell clutch of fate,--such is the stuff out of which the serious drama
must be compounded.
Now, as it happens, no philosopher has ever reiterated more often than
Ibsen his abhorrence of smug and complacent compromise, his belief in
the unimpeded independence of the individual, his conviction that every
creature here below owes it as a duty to himself to live his own life in
his own way. Just as _Brand_ stiffens himself once more and makes the
implacable declaration:
Beggar or rich,--with all my soul
I _will_; and that one thing's the whole!
So _Dr. Stockman_ announces his discovery that "the strongest man upon
earth is he who stands most alone"; and in every play we find characters
animated by this unhesitating determination and this unfaltering energy.
Even Ibsen's women, so subtly feminine in so many ways, are forever
revealing themselves virile in their self-assertion, in their claim to
self-ownership. His plays move us strangely in the performance, they
grip at the outset and firmly hold us to the relentless end, because his
dramaturgic skill is exerted upon themes essentially dramatic in that
they deal with this stark exhibition of the human will and with the
bitter struggle that must ensue when the human will is in revolt against
the course of nature or against the social bond.
When the poet-philosopher has suggested to the playwright one of these
essentially dramatic themes, Ibsen handles it with a directness which
intensifies its force and which is in itself evidence of his poetic
power. As Professor Butcher has pointed out, "we are perhaps inclined to
rate too low the genius which is displayed in the general structure of
an artistic work; we set it down merely as the hard-won result of labor,
and we find inspiration only in isolated splendors, in the
lightning-flash of passion, in the revealing power of poetic imagery."
In these last gifts Ibsen may seem to many, if not deficient, at least,
less abundant than some other dramatic poets; but he can attain "the
supreme result which Greek thought and imagination achieve by their
harmonious coöperation"; he can present "the organic union of parts." He
has the sense of form which we feel to be the final guerdon of Greek
endeavor.
A play of Ibsen's is always compact and symmetrical. It has a beginning,
a middle, and an end; it never straggles, but ever moves straightforward
to its conclusion. It has unity; and often it conforms even to the
pseudo-unities proclaimed by the superingenious critics of the Italian
renascence. Sometimes a play of Ibsen's has another likeness to a
tragedy of the Greeks, in that it presents in action before the
assembled spectators only the culminating scenes of the story. 'Ghosts'
recalls 'OEdipus the King,' not only in the horror at the heart of it
and the poignancy of the emotion it evokes, but also in its being a
fifth act only, the culmination of a long and complex concatenation of
events, which took place before the point at which Sophocles and Ibsen
saw fit to begin their plays. In the Greek tragedy, as in the
Scandinavian social drama, the poet has chosen to deal with the result
of the action, rather than with the visible struggle itself; it is not
the present doings of the characters, but their past deeds, which
determine their fate.
Altho no other play of Ibsen's attains the extraordinary compactness and
swiftness of 'Ghosts,' several of them approach closely to this
standard, the 'Master-Builder,' for example, 'Little Eyolf' and more
especially 'Rosmersholm,'--in which the author did not display on the
stage itself more than a half of the strong series of situations he had
devised to sustain the interest of the spectator and to elucidate his
underlying thesis. But Ibsen does not hold himself restricted to any one
formula; and sometimes he prefers, as in the 'Enemy of the People,' to
let the whole story unroll itself before the audience. Only slowly did
Ibsen come to a mastery of his own methods; and he had begun, in the
'League of Youth' and in the 'Pillars of Society' by doing what every
great dramatist had done before him,--by accepting the form worked out
by his immediate predecessors and adjusted to the actual theater of his
own time. Just as Shakspere followed the patterns set by Kyd and
Marlowe, by Lyly and Greene, just as Molière copied the model ready to
his hand in the Italian comedy-of-masks, so Ibsen began by assimilating
the formulas which had approved themselves in France, the land where the
drama was flourishing most luxuriantly in the middle of the nineteenth
century, formulas devised by Scribe and only a little modified by Augier
and the younger Dumas.