The actors and actresses do get their chance now and again to appear in
an Ibsen part, in spite of the reluctance of the regular managers to
risk the production of Ibsen's plays in their theaters. This reluctance
is not caused solely by an inability to appreciate his real merits; it
is magnified by a healthy distrust for the cranks and the freaks who are
most vociferous and least intelligent in praise of him,--for Ibsen, like
Browning and like Maeterlinck, has suffered severely from the fulsome
adulation of the short-haired women and the long-haired men, who are
ever exuberantly uncritical. Perhaps the unwillingness of managers to
venture their money in staging these Scandinavian social dramas is due
also to a well-founded belief that "there is no money in them,"--that
they are not likely to attract American playgoers in remunerative
multitudes,--that they cannot be forced to the long runs to which the
theater is now unfortunately committed.
Ibsen is like all other great dramatists in that he has intended his
plays to be performed in the theater, by actors, before an audience;
and, therefore has he adjusted them most adroitly to the picture-frame
stage of the modern playhouse and filled them with characters amply
rewarding the utmost endeavor of ambitious players. But the influence of
the actor and of the circumstances of the theater is only upon the
outward form of the play, while the influence of the spectator is upon
its content solely. This influence has been potent upon every true
dramatist, who has had ever in mind the special audience for whom his
plays were intended, and at whom they were aimed. Sophocles composed his
stately tragedies for the cultivated citizens of Athens, seated on the
curving hillside under the shadow of the Acropolis; Shakspere prepared
his histories and his comedies to hold the interest of the turbulent
throng which stood about the jutting platform in the yard of the
half-roofed Tudor theater; and Molière, even when he was writing to
order for Louis XIV, never forgot the likings of the fun-loving burghers
of Paris. No one of the three ever lookt beyond his own time or wasted a
thought upon any other than the contemporary audience in his own city.
Even tho their plays have proved to possess universality and permanence,
they were in the beginning frankly local in their appeal.
But who are the spectators that Ibsen saw in his mind's eye when he
imagined his plays bodied forth in the actual theater? He was not a
citizen of a great state, as Molière was, and Shakspere; he did not
dwell in a great city, exercising his art in close contact with the
abounding life of a metropolis. He was a native of a small country, not
even independent, and without large towns; he was born in a petty
village and there he grew to manhood; in his maturity he wandered abroad
and for years abode in exile, an alien, if not a recluse.
Are not the memories of youth abiding? and can any one of us free
himself wholly from the bonds of early environment? The audience that
Ibsen has ever had in view when he was making his most searching
tragedies of modern life, the audience he has always wisht to move and
to rouse, morally and intellectually, was such a group of spectators as
might gather in the tiny and isolated village where he had spent his
boyhood. Ibsen himself may not have been conscious that this was the
audience he was seeking to stimulate; indeed, he may never have
suspected it; and he might even deny it in good faith. But the fact
remains, nevertheless, obvious and indisputable; and it helps to explain
not a little that might otherwise remain obscure. It enables us to
suggest a reason for a certain closeness of atmosphere sometimes felt in
this play or that, and for a certain lack of largeness of outlook, in
spite of the depth of insight. It makes us more tolerant toward a
certain narrowness, which is often provincial and sometimes almost
parochial.
It is not merely that Ibsen's social dramas are all of them intensely
Norwegian, peopled solely with natives and having the fiords ever
present in the background. It is not merely that he has shrunk from all
international contrasts, and from all cosmopolitanism;--and here, no
doubt, he has chosen the better part. It is not that he himself has not
shaken off the pettiness of the little village where he received his
first impression of his fellow-man. It is that altho he has seen the
world outside and altho he is thereby enabled to measure the smallness
of what he left behind, he cannot forget the inhabitants of Grimstad,
individually and collectively. They supply the constituent elements of
the audience which he is ever addressing, consciously or unconsciously.
It is their limited horizon he wants to enlarge; and it is their
lethargy he is longing to shatter.