Perhaps there is no injustice in holding that much of Ibsen's arrogant
and aggressive individualism and self-assertion, is the result of his
own youthful solitude and struggle in the little village where the
druggist's ambitious apprentice who wrote poetry and who had opinions of
his own, soon managed to get on a war-footing with most of his
neighbors,--as the late Professor Boyesen recorded from his own
observations at the time, explaining that "a small town, where everybody
is interested in what his neighbor has for dinner, is invariably more
intolerant of dissent, more tyrannical toward social rebels, than a city
of metropolitan rank." And even when Ibsen removed to Christiania he did
not get out of this atmosphere of pettiness. As Professor Boyesen
remarked, again from personal experience, "One hundred thousand village
souls do not make a city." And the same compatriot of the dramatist, in
dealing with the 'Enemy of the People' declared that "each trait bears
the indelible mark of a small society, which stunts and cripples the
sons of men, making them crabbed and crooked, when in a richer soil many
of them might have shot boldly up in the sunlight."
Norway seems to be a land of villages, with a people not yet enlarged
and awakened from stifling bigotry. Its social organization still
presses painfully on those who wish to do their own thinking; and half a
century ago in Ibsen's impressionable youth, the pressure must have been
tragic. There is no call for wonder that he should have reacted
violently against these fettering restrictions. There is no need to
speculate on the reasons why he has failed to feel the extraordinary
delicacy of the problem of the equilibrium between the opposing forces,
which have a cramping socialism on the one side and an exuberant anarchy
on the other. His choice was swift and he exerted his strength
unhesitatingly against the chains which had clanked on his limbs in his
early manhood. He knew only too well and by bitter experience the
hardness of the crust that encased the Norwegian community and he felt
the need of blows still harder to break thru and let in a little light.
And this is why he is so emphatic in his individualism; this is why he
is so fiercely violent in his assertion of the right of every man to own
himself and to obey his own will, contemptuous of the social bond which
alone holds civilization together.
It is Boyesen, a fellow Norwegian and an ardent admirer of Ibsen's, who
has most clearly stated Ibsen's position: "He seems to be in ill humor
with humanity and the plan of creation in general (if, indeed, he
recognized such a plan), and he devotes himself, with ruthless
satisfaction, to showing what a paltry contemptible lot men are, and how
aimless, futile, and irrational their existence is on this earth, with
its chaotic strivings and bewildered endeavors." ... "Furthermore, he
utterly undervalues what we call civilization, which he regards
primarily as an ignominious compromise--a surrender and curtailment of
our natural rights and liberties, in return for a paltry security for
life and limb." ... "He has apparently no appreciation of the tremendous
struggle, the immense suffering, the deluge of blood and tears, it has
cost to redeem the world from that predatory liberty which he admires,
and to build up gradually the safeguards of organized society which he
so detests."
In other words, Ibsen is not what is called "an advanced thinker"; he is
really the most extreme of reactionaries, because he wants to go back to
the beginnings of civilization. He is willing to give up the chronometer
and to return to the sun-dial.
It would be unfair, of course, to sustain what is here alleged by
quoting speeches from his plays, since Ibsen is too completely a
dramatist to use any one character merely as a mask thru the mouth of
which he might voice his private opinion. But when we consider the whole
group of the social dramas and when we disengage the philosophy
underlying them and sustaining them, we may venture to deduce the
private opinion of the author. And in his letters to Georg Brandes we
find this opinion fearlessly exprest: "I have really never had any
strong feeling of solidarity; in fact, I have only in a way accepted it
as a traditional tenet of faith,--and if one had the courage to leave it
out of consideration altogether, one would perhaps be rid of the worst
ballast with which one's personality is burdened." In another letter he
wrote: "I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the
struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not greatly concern
me."
As Brandes points out, this attitude of Ibsen's is partly a reminiscence
of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever
wrestling with the realist. There is in Ibsen's writing an echo of that
note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin
of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the
Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871. And
the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching
almost simultaneously in his correspondence with Brandes: "The state
must be abolished.... Undermine the idea of the commonwealth; set up
spontaneity and spiritual kinship as the sole determining points in a
union; and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of
some value." This sounds very like a return to Rousseau, almost a
century after the futility of Rousseau's theories had been made manifest
to all.
There is no denying, however, that Ibsen's doctrine is most appealing to
a dramatist, whose business it is to set on the stage the strivings of
the individual. Perhaps the drama would be the one surviving art if
anarchy should come,--just as it would be certain to die slowly if
socialism should succeed. The self-subordination of socialism would be
as deadening as the self-surrender of fatalism to that will-power which
must ever be the mainspring of a play to move the multitude. Altho it
cannot formulate what it feels, the multitude has no relish for extreme
measures; it may be making up its mind to turn toward either anarchy or
socialism; but it means to move very slowly and it refuses to be
hurried.
Here is a reason why Ibsen's plays are never likely to be broadly
popular in the theater. The anarchistic element they contain helps to
make them more dramatic, no doubt, more vigorous and more vital; but it
is dimly perceived by the plain people who form the crowd of
theater-goers, and by them it is dumbly resented. The excessive
individualism which gives to Ibsen's best plays their tensity of
interest is also the cause of their inacceptability to the multitude
shrinking from any surrender of the hard won conquests of civilization.
There is significance in the fact that Ibsen's plays have totally failed
to establish themselves permanently in France, where the esthetic
appreciation of his mastery of his art has been keenest and most
competent, but where also the value of the social compact is most
clearly understood. Not only in France, but in all other countries
governed by the Latin tradition of solidarity, Ibsen's doctrine was
certain to be unwelcome--even if it might be wholesome. Outside of
Scandinavia it is only in Germany that Ibsen has succeeded in winning
acceptance as a popular dramatist, perhaps because it was there that the
doctrine of individualism was most needed. In Great Britain, and in the
United States, where the individual has his rights, altho with no
relaxing of the social bond, the performances of Ibsen's plays have been
surprisingly infrequent when we consider their delightful craftsmanship,
their indisputable power and their unfailing interest.
X
After all, it is not as a philosopher that Ibsen demands attention, but
as a dramatist, as a playwright who is also a poet. If it is his
weakness that his theory of life is overstrenuous, one-sided and out of
date, it is his strength that he has opinions of his own and that he is
willing to face the problems that insistently confront us to-day. As Mr.
Archer has put it tersely and conclusively, Ibsen is "not pessimist or
optimist or primarily a moralist, tho he keeps thinking about morals. He
is simply a dramatist, looking with piercing eyes at the world of men
and women, and translating into poetry this episode and that from the
inexhaustible pageant."
A moralist he must be, if his work is to have any far-reaching
significance, any final value. Morality is not something a poet can put
into his work deliberately; but it can be left out only at the poet's
peril, since few works of art are likely to be worth while if they are
ethically empty. Ibsen's inspiration is too rich for it to be void of
moral purport, even tho the playwright may not have intended all that we
read into his work. There is a moral in 'Ghosts' as there is in
'OEdipus,' in the 'Scarlet Letter,' and in 'Anna Karénina,'--a moral,
austere and dispassionate. It contains much that is unpleasant and even
painful, but--to quote Arnold's praise of 'Anna Karénina'--nothing "of a
nature to trouble the senses or to please those who wish their senses
troubled." Ibsen's play, like the tragedy of Sophocles, like the severe
stories of Hawthorne and Tolstoi, is not spoon-meat for babes; it is not
for young men and maidens; but as Goethe asked nearly a century ago,
"What business have our young girls at the theater? They do not belong
to it;--they belong to the convent; and the theater is only for men and
women who know something of human affairs." It is for these men and
these women that Ibsen, with stern self-control, has written his social
dramas, that he may force them to look into matters they are willing
enough to ignore and to front the facts of life, ugly as these may be.
More than once in the course of this essay has there been occasion to
evoke the names of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Molière, the supreme
masters of the dramatic art. To venture upon any comparison with them is
to measure Ibsen by the loftiest standard. In his technic alone can he
withstand the comparison, for he is the latest and he has profited by
all the experiments and achievements of the strong men who came before
him; in mere craftsmanship he is beyond question the foremost of all the
moderns. It must be said also that in his intellectual honesty, in his
respect for the immitigable laws of character, he rarely falls short. He
lacks the clear serenity of Sophocles, the depth and the breadth of the
myriad-minded Shakspere, the humorous toleration of Molière. The great
Greek, the great Englishman, and the great Frenchman, are, all of them,
liberal and sane and wholesome, whatever their subject-matter may be;
and here it is that the Scandinavian is felt to be inferior. There are
few of his social dramas in which we cannot find more than a hint of
abnormal eccentricity or of morbid perversity; and this is the reason
why the most of them fail to attain the dignity of true and lofty
tragedy.
Perhaps it is with Wagner that Ibsen should be grouped, rather than with
Sophocles and Shakspere and Molière. They are the two master-spirits of
the stage in the nineteenth century. They are both of them consummate
craftsmen, having assimilated every profitable device of their
predecessors and having made themselves chiefs, each in his own art. And
yet with all their witchery and all their power, we may doubt whether
their work will resist the criticism of the twentieth century, because
there is at the core of it an exaggeration or disproportion which the
future is likely to perceive more and more clearly in the receding
perspective of time.
(1905.)