VI

When we examine carefully the earlier of his social dramas we discover

Ibsen to be a playwright of surpassing technical dexterity, whose work

is sustained and stiffened and made more valuable and more vital by the

coöperation of the philosopher that Ibsen also is, a philosopher who is

a poet as well and who helps the playwright to find the stuff he

handles, the raw material of his art, in the naked human soul, in its

doubts and its perplexities, in its blind gropings and in its

ineffectual strivings. But in considering the later plays we are forced

to wonder whether the philosopher has not gained the upper hand and

reduced the playwright to slavery.

It was of Ibsen, no doubt, that M. Maeterlinck was thinking when he

asserted that "the first thing which strikes us in the drama of the day

is the decay, one might almost say, the creeping paralysis, of external

action. Next, we note a very pronounced desire to penetrate deeper into

human consciousness, and to place moral problems on a high pedestal."

And there is no denying that Ibsen's interest in moral problems has

grown steadily in intensity, and that he has sought to penetrate deeper

and deeper into human consciousness. His latest play, 'When We Dead

Awaken,' altho adjusted to the conditions of the modern theater and

altho perfectly actable, seems to be intended rather more for the reader

than for the spectator. Essentially dramatic as it is, its theatric

realization is less satisfactory--as tho Ibsen was chafing against the

restraints of the actual theater, restraints which are an integral

element of its power as a form of expression.

In the same suggestive essay, M. Maeterlinck remarked on the steady

decline of the taste for bald theatrical anecdotes,--the taste which

Scribe and Sardou were content to gratify; and he declared that "mere

adventures fail to interest us because they no longer correspond to a

living and actual reality." And yet no one has more sharply proclaimed

the sovran law of the stage than the Belgian critic-poet; no one has

more sympathetically asserted that "its essential demand will always be

_action_. With the rise of the curtain, the high intellectual desire

within us undergoes transformation; and in place of the thinker,

psychologist, mystic, or moralist, there stands the mere instinctive

spectator, the man electrified negatively by the crowd, the man whose

one desire is to see something happen." In his later and more poetic

plays Ibsen seems to be appealing more especially to the mystic and the

moralist; whereas in the earlier social dramas he was able to grip the

attention of the mere instinctive spectator, while also satisfying the

unexprest desires of the thinker.

The sheer symbolism of the poet-philosopher is powerfully suggestive,

and these later plays have an interest of their own, no doubt; but it is

in the earlier social dramas that Ibsen most clearly reveals his

dramaturgic genius,--in the 'Pillars of Society,' and the 'Doll's

House,' in 'Ghosts' and in 'Hedda Gabler.' Dennery might envy the

ingenuity with which _Consul Bernick_ is tempted to insist on the fatal

order that seems for a season to be the death-sentence of his own son;

and Sardou would appreciate the irony of _Nora's_ frantic dance at the

very moment when she was tortured by deadly fear. But these theatric

devices, in Dennery's hands or in Sardou's, would have existed for their

own sake solely; but in Ibsen's, effective as they are, they have a

deeper significance. He is able to avail himself of the complicated

machinery of the "well-made play," to flash a piercing light into the

darker recesses of human nature. However clever he may be in his

handling of these scenes, his cleverness is a means only; it is not an

end in itself. He never gives over "his habit of dealing essentially

with the individual caught in the fact,"--to borrow an apt phrase from

Mr. Henry James. The mechanism may be almost as elaborate as it is in a

play of Scribe's, wherein there is ultimately nothing but ingenuity of

invention and adroitness of construction; but it is never allowed to

crush or to keep out human nature.

_Consul Bernick_ is one of Ibsen's most veracious characters, with his

cloaking morality, his unconscious egotism, and his unfaltering

selfishness, disclosed so naïvely and so naturally. Less boldly drawn

but not the less truthful is _Helmer_, that inexpugnable prig, with his

shallow selfishness, his complacent conceit, and his morality for

external use only. Ibsen is never happier, and never is his scalpel more

skilful, than when he is laying bare the hollowness of shams like these.

Never is his touch more delicate or more caressing than when he is

delineating a character like _Bernick's_ sister _Martha_, with her

tender devotion and her self-effacing simplicity. Not even _Helmer's_

wife, _Nora_, is more truthfully conceived. _Nora_ is veraciously

feminine in never fathoming _Dr. Rank's_ love for her, or at least in

her refusal to formulate it, content to take his friendship and ask

herself no questions. Truly womanly again is her attitude when he speaks

out at last and thrusts upon her the knowledge of his passion,--her

shrinking withdrawal, her instant ordering in of the lights, and her

firm refusal then, in her hour of need, to profit by the affection he

has just declared.

It must be regretted that Ibsen does not dismiss either _Nora_ or

_Bernick_ with the final fidelity that might have been expected.

_Bernick's_ unexpected proclamation of his change of heart, so contrary

to his habits, is a little too like one of those fantastic wrenchings of

veracity of which Dickens was so often guilty in the finishing chapters

of his stories. Character is never made over in the twinkling of an eye;

and this is why the end of the 'Doll's House' seems unconvincing.

_Nora_, the morally irresponsible, is suddenly endowed with clearness

of vision and directness of speech. The squirrel who munches macaroons,

the song-bird who is happy in her cage, all at once becomes a raging

lioness. And this is not so much an awakening or a revelation, as it is

a transformation; and the _Nora_ of the final scenes of the final act is

not the _Nora_ of the beginning of the play. The swift unexpectedness of

this substitution is theatrically effective, no doubt; but we may doubt

if it is dramatically sound. Ibsen has rooted _Nora's_ fascination, felt

by every spectator, in her essential femininity, only at the end to send

her forth from her home, because she seemed to be deficient in the most

permanent and most overpowering of woman's characteristics--the maternal

instinct. It may be that she did right in leaving her children; it may

even be that she would have left them; but up to the moment when she

declared her intention to go, nothing in the play has prepared the

spectator for this strange move. Ibsen has failed to make us feel when

the unexpected happened that this, however unforeseen, was exactly what

we ought to have expected.

No fault of this kind can be found with 'Ghosts,' that drastic tragedy

of a house built on the quicksands of falsehood, that appalling modern

play with the overwhelming austerity of an ancient tragic drama, that

extraordinarily compact and moving piece, in which the Norwegian

playwright accomplished his avowed purpose of evoking "the sensation of

having lived thru a passage of actual life." A few years only before

Ibsen brought forth his 'Ghosts,' Lowell had asserted that "That Fate

which the Greeks made to operate from without, we recognize at work

within, in some vice of character or hereditary disposition"; and Greek

this play of Ibsen's is in its massive simplicity, in the economy of its

bare structure with five characters only, with no change of scene, with

no lapse of time, and with an action that rolls forward irresistibly

with inevitable inexorability. As there was something Æschylean in

'Brand' so there is something Sophoclean in 'Ghosts'; altho Ibsen lacks

the serenity of the great Greek and Sophocles had a loftier aim than

that of evoking "the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual

life." There is no echo in 'OEdipus' of the cry of revolt which rings

thru 'Ghosts,' and yet there was a strange similarity in the impression

made on at least one spectator of the actual performances of these

tragedies, the ancient and the modern, the one after the other, at a few

days' interval here in New York,--an impression of deepening horror that

graspt the throat and gript the heart with fingers of ice.

The most obvious resemblance between the Greek tragedy and the

Scandinavian social drama is in their technic, in that the two austere

playwrights have set before us the consequences of an action, rather

than the action itself. Here Ibsen has thrown aside the formula of the

"well-made play," using the skill acquired by the study of Scribe in

achieving a finer form than the French playwright was capable of, a form

seemingly simple but very solidly put together. The structure of

'Ghosts' recalls Voltaire's criticism of one of Molière's plays that it

seemed to be in action, altho it was almost altogether in narrative.

Ibsen has here shown a skill like Molière's in making narrative vitally

dramatic. Ibsen has none of Molière's breadth of humor, none of his

large laughter, none of his robust fun; indeed, Ibsen's humor is rarely

genial; grim and almost grotesque, it is scarcely ever playful; and

there is sadly little laughter released by his satiric portrayals of

character. But the Scandinavian playwright has not a little of the great

Frenchman's feeling for reality, and even more of his detestation of

affectation and his hatred of sham. The creator of _Tartuffe_ would have

appreciated _Pastor Manders_, an incomparable prig, with self-esteem

seven times heated, engrossed with appearances only and ingrained with

parochial hypocrisy.

But we may be assured that Molière, governed by the social instinct as

he was, would never have shared Ibsen's sympathy for the combatant hero

of his next play, that 'Enemy of the People,' with the chief figure of

which the dramatist has seemed willing for once to be identified. We may

even incline to the belief that Molière would have dismist _Dr.

Stockman_ as lacking in common-sense, and in the sense of humor, and

also as a creature both conceited and self-righteous, pitiably

impractical and painfully intolerant. And we are quite at a loss even to

guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the

unforgetable figure of _Célimène_ would have thought of _Hedda Gabler_,

that strangest creation of the end of the century, anatomically

virtuous, but empty of heart and avid of sensation.

In 'Hedda Gabler' as in the 'Enemy of the People' Ibsen gives up the

Sophoclean form which was exactly appropriate for the theme of 'Ghosts.'

With admirable artistic instinct the playwright returns to the framework

of the "well-made play" or at least to that modification of the Scribe

formula which Augier and Dumas _fils_ had devised for their own use. The

action has not happened before the curtain rises on the first act; it

takes place in the play itself, in front of the spectators, just as it

does in the 'Demi-monde.' The exposition is contained in the first act,

clearly and completely; the characters are all set in motion before us,

_Hedda_ and her husband, _Mrs. Elvsted_ and _Eilert_, and the sinister

figure of _Inspector Brack_ in the background. This first act, even to

its note of interrogation hung in the air at the end, might have been

constructed by Augier,--just as the scene in the second act between

_Hedda_ and _Brack_ recalls the manner of the younger Dumas, even in its

lightness and its wit. Yet we may doubt whether any of the modern French

playwrights could have lent the same curt significance to this

commonplace interview between a married _demi-vierge_ and an

_homme-à-femmes_;--of their own accord these French terms come to the

end of the pen to describe these French types.

Interesting as 'Hedda Gabler' is on the stage and in the study,

suggestive as it is, it cannot be called one of Ibsen's best-built

plays. Technically considered it falls below his higher level; it does

not sustain itself even at the elevation of the 'Demi-monde' or of the

'Effrontés.' It does not compel us to accept its characters and its

situations without question. It leaves us inquiring, and, if not

actually protesting, at least unconvinced. We might accept the heroine

herself as an incarnate spirit of cruel curiosity, inflicting

purposeless pain, and to be explained, even if not to be justified, only

by her impending maternity,--which she recoils from and is unworthy of.

But I, for one, cannot help finding _Hedda_ inconsistent artistically,

as tho she was a composite photograph of irreconcilable figures. For

example, she shrinks from scandal, yet she burns _Eilert's_ manuscript,

she gives him one of her pistols, and finally she commits suicide

herself, than which nothing could more certainly provoke talk. The

pistols themselves seem lugged in solely because the playwright needed

to have them handy for two suicides,--just as _Brack_ walks into

_Hedda's_ house in the early morning, not of his own volition, but

because the playwright insisted on it. So at the end _Mrs. Elvsted_

could not have had with her all the notes of _Eilert's_ bulky book, tho

she might have had a rough draft; and she would never have sat down

calmly to look over these notes instead of rushing madly to the hospital

to _Eilert's_ bedside. Again, _Inspector Brack_, when he hears of

_Eilert's_ death, has really little or no warrant in jumping to the

conclusion that _Hedda_ is an accessory before the fact; and even if she

was, this would not give him the hold on her which she admits too

easily. More than once, we find a summary swiftness in the motives

alleged, for things done before the spectators have time to grasp the

reasons for these deeds, which therefore appear to be arbitrary. There

is a hectic flush of romanticism in this play, not discernible in any

other of Ibsen's social dramas, a perfervidness, an artificiality,

which may not interfere with the interest of the story but which must

detract from its plausibility at least and from its ultimate value.