In spite of Ibsen's ten years of apprenticeship in two theaters, in
daily contact with the practical business of the stage, it was not with
prose-dramas of contemporary life that he first came forward as a
dramatist. In fact, his juvenile 'Katilina' (1850) was written when he
was but just of age, before he was attached to the theater
professionally, before he had read any dramatists except Holberg and
Öhlenschläger, and before he had had the chance to see much real acting
on the stage itself. It was while he was engaged in producing the plays
of others that he brought out also his own 'Mistress Inger at Ostraat'
(1855), and the 'Vikings at Helgeland' (1858), both of them actable and
often acted. They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and
now Hugo.
'Mistress Inger' is a historical melodrama, with a gloomy castle,
spectral pictures and secret passages, with shifting conspiracies,
constant mystery-mongering and contorted characters. The inexpert
playwright uses soliloquy not merely to unveil the soul of the speaker
(its eternally legitimate use), but also to convey information to the
audience as to the facts of the intrigue (an outworn expedient Ibsen
never condescended to use in the later social dramas). The plot of
'Mistress Inger' is not veracious or convincing or even plausible; and
the play lacks the broad simplicity of story to be found in the later
'Vikings,' a saga-like drama, a tale of blood and fate, which recalls
Wagnerian opera in its primitive massiveness, in the vigor of its
legend, in its tragic pathos, and in its full-blooded characters larger
than life and yet pitifully human. Power again there is in a third drama
dealing with the historic past of Norway, the 'Pretenders' (1864), which
has a savage nobility of spirit. It is true that the masterful figure of
_Bishop Nicholas_ is enigmatic enough to have stalked out of one of
Hugo's lyrical melodramas, but to counterbalance this there is a pithy
wisdom in the talk of the _Skald_ which one would seek in vain in the
French romanticist drama.
Nowadays many of us are inclined to regard the historical drama as a
bastard form and to agree with Maeterlinck in dismissing even the most
meritorious attempts as "artificial poems that arise from the impossible
marriage of past and present." Already between the 'Vikings' and the
'Pretenders' had Ibsen undertaken a play dealing with contemporary
social usages. 'Love's Comedy' (1862) made its way on the stage; and it
has found an English translator. But in this rendering it reveals itself
as an attempt to commingle romance and satire; it appears to us as
hopelessly unfunny; and there is an artistic inconsistency between a
stern realism seeking to handle actual life with rigorous tensity and a
soaring idealism which keeps obtruding itself.
'Love's Comedy' is in verse, irregular and rimed, well-nigh impossible
to render satisfactorily into another tongue. Ibsen never again
undertook to use rime or even meter in handling the manners of his own
time. "I cannot believe that meter will be employed to any considerable
extent in the drama of the near future, for the poetic intentions of the
future cannot be reconciled with it," so Ibsen declared in 1883, thus
passing judgment on 'Love's Comedy.' And he added that he had written
scarcely any verse for years but "had exclusively cultivated the
incomparably more difficult art of writing in the even, beautiful idiom
of real life."
It was in 1857 that Björnson had put forth 'Synnöve Solbakken,' a mere
novelet, it is true, but still the firstling of a native Norwegian
literature, reproducing the very accent of the soil; and here we have
once more an example of the way in which the novel is now continually
affecting the development of the drama, as the play has in the past
influenced the evolution of prose-fiction. For more than ten years Ibsen
failed to see how much it would profit him to follow Björnson's lead.
Between 'Love's Comedy' and the 'League of Youth' he put forth his two
great dramatic poems, 'Brand' (1866) and 'Peer Gynt' (1867); and even
after the 'League of Youth' (1869) had opened the series of modern
social dramas, he published 'Emperor and Galilean' (1873) before
resuming his incisive study of the life that lay around him.
The career of Julian the Apostate is sketched in what must be termed a
chronicle-play, in two parts and in ten acts, a broadly brushed panorama
of antique life, displaying Ibsen's abundant invention, his ability to
handle boldly a large theme, his gift of putting characters erect on
their feet with a few swift strokes. Altho 'Emperor and Galilean,' like
'Brand' and like 'Peer Gynt' was intended for the closet only, and not
for the stage itself, it proves its author to be a true dramatist,
centering the interest of his story on an essential struggle and keeping
in view always the pictorial aspects of his action.
In this chronicle-play, as in his two greater dramatic poems, Ibsen
reveals his perfect understanding of the practical necessities of the
playhouse, even tho he did not choose always to conform to them. Then
he turned his back on antiquity and faced the present in the series of
prose-plays by which he is most widely known to actual playgoers. He
found his characters and his themes in modern life and in his native
land; and the social dramas followed one another in steady
succession,--'Pillars of Society' (1877), 'A Doll's House' (1879),
'Ghosts' (1881), 'An Enemy of the People' (1882), the 'Wild Duck'
(1884), 'Rosmersholm' (1886), the 'Lady from the Sea' (1888), 'Hedda
Gabler' (1890), the 'Master-Builder' (1892), 'Little Eyolf' (1894),
'John Gabriel Borkman' (1896) and 'When We Dead Awaken' (1899).
As we look down this list, we see that it is perhaps unfair to class all
the later plays as social dramas. Some of them, more especially the
latest of them all, 'When We Dead Awaken,' seem to be symbolical rather
than social, allegorical in intent even if they remain realistic in
treatment. Brandes long ago declared that Ibsen had had a Pegasus killed
under him; but when we consider the 'Lady from the Sea' and 'When We
Dead Awaken' and perhaps one or two other of their later companions, we
may well believe that the winged steed was not actually slain. Wounded
it may have been, only to recover its strength again and to proffer its
back once more for the poet to bestride.
V
These more poetic of Ibsen's plays in prose seem at times almost
surcharged with a meaning which is nevertheless often so mockingly
intangible and evasive, that we dare to wonder at last whether the
secret they persist in hiding in this tantalizing fashion would really
reward our efforts to grasp it; and we find comfort in Lowell's apt
saying that "to be misty is not to be mystic." Ibsen is mystic, no
doubt, but on occasion he can be misty also. And not only the plays that
are merely misty but even those that are truly mystic, are less likely
than the plainer-spoken social dramas to hold our attention in the
theater itself, where the appeal is to the assembled multitude, and
where all things need to be clearly defined so that the spectators can
follow understandingly every phase of the changing action.
In the most of his social dramas Ibsen makes his meaning transparently
clear; and there is never any undue strain on the attention of the
average playgoer. Especially is he a master of the difficult art of
exposition. It is the plain duty of the playwright to acquaint the
audience with the antecedent circumstances upon which the plot is
based,--to inform the spectators fully as to that part of the story
which has gone before and which is not to be displayed in action on the
stage,--to explain the relation of the several characters to each
other,--and to arouse interest in what is about to happen. Scribe, than
whom no one ever had a wider knowledge of the necessities of the
theater, held the exposition to be so important that he often sacrificed
to it the whole of his first act, introducing his characters one by one,
setting forth clearly what had happened before the play, and sometimes
postponing the actual beginning of the action to the end of the first
act, if not to the earlier scenes of the second. Scribe seems to have
believed that it did not matter much how dull the first act might be,
since the spectators had paid their money and would not abandon hope
until they had seen at least the second act, in which he sought always
to grip their interest.
In the 'League of Youth,' the earliest of his social dramas, Ibsen
follows in Scribe's footsteps; and the first act is little more than a
preparatory prolog. In this play the whole story is set forth in action
in the play itself; but in the following dramas, 'Pillars of Society'
and 'A Doll's House' Ibsen reveals his tendency to deal with the results
of deeds which took place before he begins the play itself. In other
words, he suppresses his prolog, preferring to plunge at once into his
action; and this forces him to modify Scribe's leisurely method. He does
not mass his explanations all in the earlier scenes; he scatters them
thruout the first act, and sometimes he even postpones them to the
later acts. But he is careful to supply information before it is needed,
adroitly letting out in the first scene what is required for the
understanding of the second scene, and artfully revealing in the second
scene what must be known before the third scene can be appreciated.
This method is less simple than Scribe's; it is not only more difficult,
it may be dangerous; but when it is managed successfully it lends to the
drama a swift directness delightful to all who relish a mastery of form.
In 'Ghosts,' for example, the play which is acted before us is little
more than a long fifth act, in three tense scenes; and the knowledge of
what had happened in the past is ingeniously communicated to the
audience at the very moment when the information is felt to be most
significant. But in 'Rosmersholm,' strong as the drama is and fine as
its technic is, Ibsen's method seems to be at fault in that we learn too
late what it would have interested us greatly to know earlier. It is
only at the end almost that we are allowed to perceive what were
_Rebecca West's_ real intentions in coming to Rosmersholm and how the
influence of the house itself has transformed her. When the curtain
rises she is presented to us already a changed woman; and we are at a
loss to understand her motives for the evil deeds she has wrought, until
we are told at last that she once was far different from what she now
is. Here Ibsen loses more than he gains by abandoning the simpler method
of massing his exposition in the earlier scenes of the play. Anything
which confuses the spectator, which leaves him in doubt, which keeps him
guessing, is contrary to Spencer's principle of "economy of attention,"
as important in the other arts as it is in rhetoric.
Altho he is ever seeking to awaken curiosity, to arouse the interest of
expectancy, and to excite in the spectators a desire to see the thing
through, Ibsen refrains from any mere mystery-mongering for its own
sake. He wishes his audience to give attention not so much to the bare
happenings of his story, however startling they may be in themselves, as
to the effect which these happenings are certain to have on the
characters. He is abundant in inventive ingenuity and in devising
effective situations; and the complications of the plot of the 'Pillars
of Society' would probably have hugely pleased Scribe. But he has also
the larger imagination which can people situation with character and
which can make situation significant as an opportunity for character to
express itself. Ingenious as he is in plot-building, with him character
always dominates situation. To Ibsen character is destiny, and the
persons of his plays seem to have created, by their own natural
proceeding, the predicaments in which they are immeshed.
Ibsen is particularly happy in the subordinate devices by which he
reveals character,--for example, _Maia's_ taking off the green shade
when the _Master-Builder_ enters the room. And another device, that of
the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and
which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early 'League of
Youth,' is so delicately utilized in certain of the later
plays--witness, the "vine-leaves in his hair" of 'Hedda Gabler' and the
"white horses" in 'Rosmersholm'--that these recurrent phrases are
transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner's leading-motives. So,
too, Ibsen does without the _raisonneur_ of Dumas and Augier, that
condensation of the Greek chorus into a single person, who is only the
mouthpiece of the author himself and who exists chiefly to point the
moral, even tho he may sometimes also adorn the tale. Ibsen so handles
his story that it points its own moral; his theme is so powerfully
presented in action that it speaks for itself.
It must also be noted that Ibsen, like all born playwrights, like Scribe
and Dumas and Augier, like Sophocles and Shakspere and Molière, is well
aware of the double aspect of the theater, in that the stage can rise to
the loftiest heights of philosophic poetry and that it can fall also to
the lowest depths of the show-business. An audience has ears, but the
spectators who compose it have eyes also; and the born playwright never
fails to provide the picturesqueness and the visible movement which
satisfy the senses, whatever may be the more serious appeal to the mind.
In the modern theater the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame; and
it is the duty of the dramatist to satisfy our demand for a
stage-setting pictorially adequate. The sets of Ibsen's plays have
evidently been sharply visualized by him; they are elaborately
described; and they lend themselves effectively to the art of the
scene-painter. Sometimes they are beautiful in themselves, novel and
suggestive; always are they characteristic of the persons and of the
underlying idea of the play.