_THE REAL IBSEN_
In reading Nordau’s chapter on Ibsen, one cannot help wondering why
our alienist has given his book the form he has. The feeling which
the preceding contents of his work have more or less inspired—that
there is a discrepancy between the apparent plan of the work and its
execution—almost ripens into conviction on the perusal of his chapter
on Ibsen.
He says in his dedication to Professor Lombroso: “Now I have undertaken
the work of investigating the tendencies of the fashion in art and
literature, of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy
of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for
manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility,
and dementia.” He also says that he “ventures to fill a void in your
[Lombroso’s] powerful system.” From what he says higher up on the same
page about the power of books and works of art to influence the masses,
and his many hints in other parts of the book, as, for example, in its
concluding pages, we must understand that his great object is to do
what he can to arrest the downward movement of human intelligence.
He thus assumes that there is a degenerating process going on
throughout civilization, but attentive readers of his book feel the
whole time that this assumption, far from being proved to be correct,
rests on data supplied by Nordau, which strongly warn his readers to
accept them only with a grain of salt.
On the other hand, there are a host of indications in all civilized
countries pointing to an increase in intellectual power, moral
strength, and æsthetic refinement. Some of these indications would
probably not be undervalued by Nordau himself: the rapid progress of
science, the increasing education among the masses, the large number of
newspapers and periodicals dealing intelligently with various branches
of knowledge, professions, and trades, the wider application of
scientific methods to industry, wonderful inventions, not the outcome
of discovery, but of intelligent induction, the decay of superstition,
love of investigation, etc. Nordau, having allowed that the test of
a sound mind is its ability to attend rationally to one’s business,
ought to recognize that the growth of intellectual power is manifest in
improved business methods, skill, manufacturing, complicated and daring
financial schemes, ingenious co-operative systems, well-managed and
disciplined trades’-unions, nay, even cleverly laid plots to defraud.
An increasing moral strength is proved by the growth of the altruistic
feeling, the devotion with which the cause of humanity, morality, and
progress is served by people who, thanks to scientific scepticism,
expect no reward in another world; the greater sincerity observable in
all religious bodies, the magnitude of charitable institutions, the
magnificent heroism displayed by captains and crews on sinking ships,
by our life-boat men in attempting to save the shipwrecked, by our
colliers’ efforts to rescue the victims of explosions, etc. The great
victories of the Germans over the French and the complete success
of the commanders’ daring tactics have been largely, and probably
correctly, ascribed to the moral qualities of the German army, while
the utter defeat of the French cannot be ascribed to the want of moral
qualities, but to bad leadership. A quarter of a century has elapsed
since the Franco-German war, but there is no reason to believe that the
moral qualities of the German army have degenerated. That no degeneracy
has taken place in the English, French, and Italian armies has been
proved by the Chitral expedition, by the French war with Madagascar,
and by the Italian operations in Africa.
If, despite these manifest signs of growing intellectual power and
moral strength, Nordau’s deep insight into psychological matters
has revealed to him a mental degeneracy in the civilized world, his
way of investigating such decay, his mode of dealing with it, and
especially the causes he attributes to it, are too vacillating, too
contradictory, and too biassed to inspire confidence. While sometimes,
as in his chapter entitled “Etiology,” he refers to such causes as
the increase in the consumption of spirits and tobacco, the factory
system, overwork, overcrowding—all causes palpable to all who have
given any attention to social questions,—in the rest of his book he
seems to regard certain popular writers and artists as the great
cause of general degeneration who should be specially noticed. This
contradiction cannot be explained away on the plea that his book is
only part of a wider investigation which has already been made, or
might be made, regarding the causes of degeneration, and that, so long
as his work is intended to treat of the influence of literature and
art, his ignoring of other causes is legitimate. If an effect is first
attributed to one cause and then to another, we may be sure that there
is something wrong with the reasoning. We cannot prove first that
the tendency to hysteria, so common in people engaged in a certain
class of business, is due to overwork, and afterwards prove that the
same tendency in the same people is due to Rossetti’s pictures or to
Swinburne’s poems.
Nordau never furnishes an explanation of the enormous importance
he attaches to the influence of writers and artists, and the small
importance he attaches to the more palpable causes of degeneration,
of the existence of some of which he is aware. Nor does he tell us
how he reconciles the two facts, alternately insisted upon by him,
that degeneration in artists is the cause of degeneration in their
surroundings; and again, that the degeneration of their surroundings is
the cause of degeneration in artists and authors.
If such artists and authors as Nordau believes to be degenerate are
the effect of degeneration all round, they are surely the smallest and
least deplorable results, and it was certainly not worth while to write
so bulky a volume about them. Nordau mentions about a score; and what
is a score compared to the mass of humanity, or to the five hundred
million people included in western civilization? A degeneration that
would not have other results than that of producing twenty degenerate
men, who, though they are in many respects a source of enjoyment to
many, may have a grain of insanity in their brains, would not be worth
noticing. If, on the other hand, these supposed degenerates are not
what, to the ordinary mind, they decidedly appear to be—the children of
their time—but the actual causes of such serious psychological effects
which statistics seem to reveal, we are face to face with a phenomenon
which surely demanded a different method of investigation.
The real connection between the causes and the effects should have been
ascertained. For instance, the most alarming feature of degeneration
in England—that weak-mindedness which leads to drunkenness—should
have been connected with the mystical painters and poets, and should
have been proved not to have been the result of those causes which
seem palpable to every man. Then the influence of individuals on the
masses in general should have been ascertained. History offers a wide
field for such an investigation. If it had been found that authors
and artists exercise less influence than other individuals, such as
sovereigns, statesmen, prophets, reformers, revolutionary leaders,
discoverers, explorers, and others, the influence of these should have
at first been studied, and what could not be attributed to them might
have been laid at the door of artists and authors.
In examining history, old and new, we are struck with the extremely
slight effects which have been produced by _littérateurs_ and
artists, and the enormous, all-powerful influence exercised by other
individuals. Books have influenced books, poets have influenced
poets, painters have influenced painters, but the political, social,
intellectual, moral, and æsthetical development of a nation has over
and over again been completely determined by men who have been neither
artists nor authors.
In modern times the same fact is palpable. Has ever the world been
influenced more than by such men as Cavour, Prince Bismarck, Mr.
Gladstone, Napoleon III.? and how might not the fate of humanity
be determined in the near future by such men as, for example, the
Emperor of Germany and the Czar of Russia? On the mental qualities
of the Emperor of Germany depends largely whether Germany is to be
crushed under the army system; whether it is to be ruined by financial
blunderings; whether there shall be peaceful development of its
resources, or war to the knife between its classes; whether healthy
reforms shall gradually clear away its social anomalies, or whether a
revolution of unprecedented atrocity shall uproot its very foundations;
whether its inhabitants shall develop those characteristics to which
peace and happiness are conducive, or those which would inevitably be
fostered if Germany were made the battle-field of modern armies.
On the mental qualities of the Czar depend directly the destiny of a
hundred million people, and indirectly the peace of the world. Russia
is only too willing to progress under an imperial leader. On the
occasion of his accession to the throne and his marriage, millions
of people anxiously scanned his portrait and tried to read in his
features the fate of Europe. The presence of lines supposed to indicate
weak character produced prophecies of clerical domination, opposition
to progress, and death to Russia; while a kindly expression of the
eyes inspired many with hopes of a new era for Tolstoi’s unfortunate
countrymen.
It is not only personages of high rank and sovereign power whose mental
state is of utmost importance to humanity. The political situation
in most countries is capable of producing at any moment a man who,
without being either an author or an artist, might be able to change
the destiny of nations. It is not the opportunity that is wanting,
it is the men. France is panting for a man. The working classes in
America and in England stand in need of a good leader. In Germany
Liebknecht threatens to divide the power with the Emperor. A political
Tolstoi might, at the head of the Russian people, sweep the recreant
bureaucrats from his Fatherland.
It is then sovereigns, politicians, and popular leaders whose
mental state is of the utmost importance, and whose influence may
overwhelmingly determine the mental and moral development of humanity.
An answer to the question whether they are degenerates, or whether
they are of mentally or morally sound mind, is momentous to the whole
civilized world, especially if it be admitted that the minds of the
race are so susceptible of being moulded by the minds of influential
men.
But who are the men whom Nordau blames for the degeneracy for which
he finds the proof in statistics? Poets and artists, whose very names
are known only to the educated classes, and who for the most part
supply what the market demands, or simply reflect the society around
them. The most surprising of all is that he himself denies any power
or any talent in some of these men, calling them—to omit his worse
epithets—such names as drivelling idiots, weak-minded graphomaniacs,
etc.
One condition seems however necessary before a man can receive the
compliment of being called names by Nordau—he must have attracted
public attention. We have therefore said, and repeat it, that his
desperate attempt to make out Ibsen to be a degenerate renders it
impossible to form a clear idea of his object, or of his reasons, for
the methods he has adopted.
Henrik Ibsen aims not at being a prophet, a teacher, or a regenerator
of mankind either by literary or scientific methods. No one can
detect in his works special ethics, or particular religious or social
views. It is characteristic of his pieces—and according to many of
his opponents a great fault in them—that he points no moral, that the
questions involved remain at the end of the piece exactly where they
were at the beginning, that his heroes and heroines are no heroes and
no heroines, and cannot serve as models of conduct. His opponents and
admirers alike complain that they cannot get at his meaning, and that
he will not explain himself. It is therefore surprising that there
should be so much talk about the influence he exercises, and that
Nordau himself should speak about “Ibsen’s dogmas,” “Ibsen’s code of
morals,” and about Ibsen himself as a “reformer.”
Those who speak about Ibsen’s influence on the ethics of our time
cannot, as a rule, give any explanation of their meaning which can
justify the importance they attach to it. They are apt to point to
his influence on the English drama and blame him for certain of its
objectionable features. But to those who understand his pieces it is
perfectly clear that he has not been followed by English dramatists in
such things as have made him famous and popular. They have contented
themselves with imitating certain situations and with referring to some
objectionable feature in modern society, which Ibsen does reluctantly,
compelled to do so by the situation, and in order to emphasize types of
character which are only too common in every civilized country, but are
so closely draped in hypocrisy as to require the great dramatist’s lens
to show them up. His imitators however exemplify entirely exceptional
cases and conjure up characters the prototypes of which it would be
extremely hard to find. He aims at presenting stern reality; they aim
at producing risky situations. Indeed, his imitators cannot be said to
have been influenced by him more than has his brilliant parodist, Mr.
F. Anstey.
In Germany, as in the Scandinavian countries, complaints are sometimes
raised against Ibsen’s influence on women, especially young women.
Our daughters are getting Ibsenized, is the cry raised by a number of
Philistine parents. It is perhaps natural that Ibsen’s influence on
women in those countries, where the staging of Ibsen’s pieces recalls
more familiar presentations should be greater than in England, where
the Norwegian manner of life is but little known. But too much weight
might easily be attached to the difference in acquaintance with Norway.
There is a far more powerful reason why Ibsen’s so-called influence
should appear to be more marked on German and Norwegian women than on
English women.
With the exception of the United States, there is no country in the
world where respectable women are better treated than in England. An
old adage says, with a great deal of truth, that the wife of the German
is his slave, the wife of the Frenchman is his mistress, and the wife
of the Englishman is the queen of his house. The German woman certainly
has of old held a position in her home which might well lead her to
envy the English woman, and as the Scandinavian countries have been
largely affected by Germany in their social manners and habits, the
women of these countries have ample cause for dissatisfaction. Since
the time of Frederika Bremer, a woman’s revolt has been brewing in
the Scandinavian countries, and the aspirations for more liberty, a
more natural life, and more happiness have been constantly becoming
stronger, and were highly developed before Ibsen’s first piece
appeared. Besides, the spread of English fiction in Germany and in the
northern countries of Europe has shown the women of those countries
that a happier life is quite possible.
The road to the realization of such aspirations was however barred by
custom and the selfish view of the question taken by the men. They
had no objection to high-spirited, talented, well-dressed, and lively
women, whose attractions could evoke in them romantic and ardent
feelings; and a great many knew well enough that leisure, exemption
from hard work, good food, plenty of exercise, suitable friends,
artistic surroundings, good books, a fair amount of pleasure, and
considerate treatment were required to transform a young woman into
that feminine ideal which they worshipped in their imagination. But
they repudiated entirely the idea of having such ideals in their wives.
It would have clashed far too much with the traditional type of a good
wife, and to marry one deviating from this type would have set the
whole circle of acquaintances talking. Besides, a wife conforming to
the ideal was considered an expensive luxury, leading to waste of money
which could be much better employed.
Mothers of girls, well acquainted with the marriage market,
consequently exerted all their energy to form their daughters for
the positions they were expected to occupy. House-cleaning, washing,
cooking, darning, etc.,—this was what they had to learn. A demure
demeanour was what they had to practise. The society of men was what
they had to avoid. Romantic ideas had, above all, to be suppressed,
and only such love as would come after marriage, or at least after
betrothal, was considered legitimate and decent.
A great feature in their education was to closely observe the evils and
troubles which followed upon poverty, and how much more comfortable
life would be with a prosperous though unattractive husband than with a
beloved man who might not succeed in the world. The idea of refusing a
proposal of marriage from a well-to-do man, however old and prosy, was
regarded as preposterous, and any respectable girl dreaming of such a
thing would have been considered as a romantic, ungrateful hussy.
As the men seldom married young, the girls were taught to ask no
questions about their past, and were trained to sacrifice all their
ideals of purity, their dreams of love, what a free woman would call
her self-respect, their future happiness, their healthful youth, on the
altar of Philistine respectability.
There are other ways of degrading women besides yoking them with an
ox to a plough, and that they were degraded and de-naturalized the
thinking German and Scandinavian women had felt long before Ibsen
wrote plays. The struggle for better treatment was however extremely
weak and the progress towards emancipation extremely slow. Just
as oppressive government, with its police persecution, gags open
discontent and drives the forces of revolt under ground, so the tyranny
over the German and Scandinavian women—when tradition and prejudice
prevented open manifestations—developed in the hearts of women,
especially among the most gifted, a dangerously strong spirit of revolt.
Already at the time when Ibsen began to write there were numerous
but isolated outbreaks. The old treatment, which generally resulted
in turning the married woman into a dull, despondent house-slave, a
soured invalid, a nagging scold, or a gossiping zany, began to produce
scoffing Aspasias, neurotic adventuresses, and here and there avenging
furies.
This tendency to revolt among the women was stronger in Norway than in
the other countries, because it developed parallel with that ethical
awakening—the new _Aand_[1]—which during the latter part of this
century has taken possession of so many Norwegian minds; also because
the strongly imaginative and contemplative character of the Norwegian
people, and the intensely emotional nature of their women, led them
to brood over their wrongs in a thoroughly Norwegian fashion. Better
education and wide reading tended in the same direction.
[Footnote 1: _Aand_, the Norwegian for spirit, inspiration.]
Ibsen has therefore not Ibsenized the Scandinavian ladies. He has
simply seized upon a social phenomenon and, understanding its gravity,
has held it up to his contemporaries for a study and a warning.
Nordau, having committed the egregious mistake of believing that Ibsen
has invented whereas he has in reality only copied, and that a social
phenomenon which is natural to intellectual and moral progress is a
result of Ibsen’s writings, is, in his capacity of the most German of
Germans, naturally wroth with Ibsen for representing as a social evil
what a normal sound-minded common-sense German—the very type of the
non-degenerate—would consider as a useful and comfortable arrangement.
There are several excuses for Nordau’s belief that Ibsen misrepresents
reality. The improvement in woman’s status in society has no doubt
advanced more in Germany than in the Scandinavian countries. It is
possible that the Dowager Empress’s influence as an Englishwoman has
not been so great as is generally supposed, but there can be little
doubt that English novels, from Charlotte Bronté’s _Jane Eyre_ upwards,
have considerably furthered justice towards German women. The close
business connections between Germany and England, the numerous Germans
who have had a long experience of English life, have no doubt done much
to spread English social views in Germany.
The German women may therefore now have less cause for discontent and
revolt than the Scandinavian women, and it is excusable if the Germans
consider that they treat them fairly and well.
To observing Englishmen who visit Germany it is however clear that the
whole Philistine idea of the housewife is still prevailing in that
country. A great number of husbands consider it a distinct advantage
to be able to throw off all restraint in their own homes and to compel
their wives to accommodate themselves as well as they can to their
whims, their habits, their indulgences. That exasperating type, the
house-tyrant, which is found in all countries, and not seldom in
England, is especially prevalent in Germany.
German men are well aware that their wives have nothing in common
with the fascinating ideal woman of their imagination, and they are
quite satisfied that it should be so. Their work, their studies, their
profession, or their business demands all their attention, and they
could not dream of dismissing them from their minds when they enter
their homes. A woman who would distract her husband’s attention from
such important subjects would be an impediment to his success, while
the typical housewife, by her cares and ministrations, furthers it.
Like most men, Germans have chivalrous leanings, and enjoy a courteous
intercourse with ladies, but it is generally not their wives who reap
the advantages of this taste. It is the other ladies, those they
meet in society, and not seldom do they muster all their powers of
gallantry, all their means of pleasing, and all their faculty to amuse
in the company of women of light character, often in every respect
inferior to their wives.
It is those German women who feel that their happiness and their
lives have been sacrificed, not for their husbands, but to a vicious
conception of married life, who sympathize with the women of Ibsen, and
have thus contributed largely to the fame of that dramatist in Germany.
Ibsen has not Ibsenized the German ladies, but his pieces have revealed
the existence of a grudge long harboured by German women.
It is only just to record that, though Englishwomen, especially those
who live and are treated up to the English ideal, as we mentioned
before, live under much happier circumstances as children, girls,
_fiancées_, and wives, there are many of our countrywomen whose
marriages have been a cruel disillusion. Many Englishmen marry too
young, before they know their own minds, and under the feverish
impulse of a first love. When such young husbands are thoughtless,
selfish, or when they have made a bad choice, a miserable married
life is the result. In a great number of young households happiness
prevails, thanks to the strong-mindedness and tact of the young wife,
who can take care of herself and of her husband also. But thousands of
marriages turn out utter failures, not for want of love, but from the
husband’s utter ignorance of how to take care of his wife’s health,
beauty, and happiness.
Though it is the fashion in this country not to adapt but to translate
literally Ibsen’s pieces, there would be no difficulty to so adapt them
as to render them exact representations of the state of many an English
home. And this is sufficient to explain his fame in England. Here,
as on the continent, it is the selfish, mean, bullying husbands who
cannot find any sense in Ibsen’s pieces, and who are extremely shocked
at what they consider Ibsen’s perversion in attempting to enlist, by
inexplicable devices, the sympathies of the audience for the erring
wife, when these should be vouchsafed to the husband, who appears to be
such a respectable, common-sense man.
When Ibsen thus calls attention to the importance and the gravity of
the feeling of revolt which has long rankled in the minds of thinking
women all over the world, and which manifested itself long before
Ibsen’s pieces were known outside Norway, he cannot fairly be said
to be responsible for the growing discontent. In reality, he has
rendered the world a great service: for the new views and aspirations
of modern educated women can neither be suppressed nor ignored without
considerable danger to society.
In order to understand that the demand for the purification of
marriage is not a transitory whim, it will suffice to consider who
made the marriage laws, and, what is more important, who inaugurated
the traditional views concerning them. Men alone did. Not the young
men, who would be largely swayed by the yearning for true love and
by chivalrous considerations, but the law-makers of old; that is to
say, elderly men of influence and fortune. In the olden times, when
the foundations of social customs were laid, the rights of women
were considerably less respected than in our days; and under such
circumstances the law-makers did not feel called upon to consider woman
to any large extent, but made laws and introduced customs which suited
themselves. What they wanted was, firstly, to marry young and beautiful
wives, despite all objections that might be raised against their
age, their looks, or their characters, and without much troublesome
courtship; and, secondly, to keep their young wives in subjection by
sheer force and legal compulsion.
It is not reasonable to suppose that the fair sex should submit for
ever to such treatment, and, as the women in the English-speaking
countries have already gained large concessions, it is natural that
their sisters in the rest of the civilized world should struggle for
reform.
It is therefore difficult to see why Nordau should consider Ibsen’s
influence so dangerous to society as to deem it necessary to hold him
up as a degenerate. The enigma becomes more puzzling when we find that
Nordau frankly allows that Ibsen has great merits and great talents.
He says, for instance: “Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and
power.” “He has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike
and impressive manner that which has excited his feelings.” “He has
the capacity for imagining situations in which the characters are
forced to turn inside out their inmost nature, in which abstract ideas
transform themselves into deeds, and moods of opinion and of feeling,
imperceptible to the senses but potent as causes, are made patent to
sight and hearing in attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature,
and in words.” “He knows how to group events into living frescoes
possessing the charm of significant pictures... not like Wagner, with
strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, mechanical
magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating vision into the
background of souls and the conditions of humanity.... But he does not
allow the imagination of the spectator to run riot in mere spectacles;
he forces them into moods, he binds them by his spell in circles of
ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.” “The power
with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a situation, an
emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher than his
skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time... Each of the terse
words which suffice him has something of the nature of a peep-hole,
through which limitless vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples
of all ages have few situations at once so perfectly simple and so
irresistibly affecting.”
Further on he again says: “It must be acknowledged that Ibsen has
created some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness
such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare... None
the less no poet since the illustrious Spanish master (Cervantes) has
succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain, jolly, healthy
common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety as to things eternal,
and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, obvious duties without a
suspicion of higher moral obligations, as this Gina.... Hjalmar also
is a perfect creation, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the
cogent temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entrancingly
that ‘self-restraint’ in every word which, as Goethe says, ‘reveals the
master.’”
We have quoted somewhat lengthily from this eulogy of Ibsen in order
to render justice both to him and to Nordau. There is no passage in
Nordau’s book which displays more insight into dramatic art and a more
intelligent appreciation of some of the subtle but marvellous merits of
Ibsen’s plays. We should not have thought it possible that so keen an
appreciation could have been formed without seeing Ibsen’s pieces acted
in the original language. This eulogy becomes all the more valuable
when we remember that it emanates from one of Ibsen’s opponents—from
a man who would fain restrain Ibsen from writing at all, and who
evidently has not paid any attention to the slow but important social
struggle which Ibsen so frequently illustrates.
Most people who have read these and other acknowledgments on the part
of Nordau of Ibsen’s talent, will be struck with the reckless manner
in which Nordau defeats his own object. He wishes to warn the world
against “degenerates” of Ibsen’s type, and at the same time praises him
as few writers have been praised, seemingly without considering that in
this manner he inspires thousands of young writers with the ambition to
be degenerates as Ibsen is.
To the average reader Nordau suggests the idea of the impossibility
of reconciling so much power, genius, talent, and craftsmanship with
decayed mental faculties. This all the more as Ibsen’s pieces are
financial successes, and he consequently shows a solid capacity for
the management of his own affairs, which, as Nordau has already told
us, and every alienist would tell us, is the safest test of a sound
brain. The conclusion seems inevitable that Nordau is either utterly
wrong when he sees all these merits in Ibsen’s work, or else when he
considers him to be degenerate.
In examining the grounds on which Nordau strives to establish his
theory of degeneracy we shall no doubt find that the latter alternative
is the true one.
Nordau first impeaches Ibsen’s reputation for realism, but takes
this term in its most literal sense. The stage has its limitations,
and the dramatist must have a certain licence in the creating of
his situations. Ibsen is not called a realist because all that he
represents on the stage is in closer conformity with reality than the
representations of practically any other dramatist ever were, but
because his characters, besides being individually true to nature, are
types—strongly coloured types, it may be, but not too strongly coloured
to be understood by an average audience. In a piece not intended to be
played the characters may be more delicately moulded, but when they
are to be grasped in a few flashes before the footlights they must,
like the statue intended for an elevated position, be hewn in bold
proportions.
In order to show how unreal Ibsen is, Nordau asks whether it is
probable that the joiner, Engstrand (in _Ghosts_), wishing to open
a tavern for sailors, should call upon his own daughter to be the
odalisque of his “establishment.” By using the word “odalisque,” and
by placing the word “establishment” between inverted commas, he gives
a distorted idea of the tavern Engstrand is going to open. It is a
question of a real tavern, not of an “establishment.” Girls in similar
taverns in Norway are of course exposed to temptations and sometimes to
insults, but they are by no means necessarily unchaste. In selecting
the employment in the tavern, Ibsen succeeds in giving an insight into
the Philistine character of Engstrand, who for the sake of money would
risk his daughter’s reputation, but who could always fall back on the
excuse that he did not intend to ruin her.
Nordau may be right when he says that no Paris doctor would have told
Oswald Alving in _Ghosts_ that he had softening of the brain. But Ibsen
does not say “softening of the brain”; he makes Alving say “a kind
of softening of the brain,” an expression which might very well be
Oswald’s interpretation of what the doctor had told him in very guarded
words. Moreover it is not as an alienist that Ibsen has gained his
fame; it is as a dramatist.
Nordau quotes as another example of unreality, the sense in which the
term “society” is used by the characters in the _Pillars of Society_.
This is an error into which Nordau has evidently been led by reading
a bad German translation of the piece. Ibsen’s characters do not
mean “social edifice,” as Nordau pedantically will have it, but the
well-to-do people in the community.
Again, he thinks that excuse very unreal which Berneck gives to his
foreman, whom he has not taken into his confidence. But this unreality
is precisely what Ibsen wishes the public to see, and he has evidently
not accentuated the unreality sufficiently, as this has escaped even
Nordau. Nordau does not find the speech of Pastor Rörlund realistic
enough. The fact is that the speech is a delightful parody, in no way
exaggerated, of those addresses which toadying sycophants all the world
over are in the habit of delivering to a magnate whom they desire to
propitiate. Any one who has heard such a speech in Norway will be
amusedly surprised by its comic realism.
It would be tiresome to go minutely into the proofs of unreality
Nordau finds in Ibsen’s pieces, and the bare mention of the following
examples will suffice to show the futility of his attempt. He considers
it impossible for a man of forty-three to inspire love, and this in
Norway, where people develop and ripen so slowly. He thinks it unreal
for an excitable girl to describe as a storm on the sea the passion
which induces her to encourage her rival’s suicide, and then when
the rival is out of the way patiently to devote a year and a half
to gaining the love for which her sin was committed. Our alienist,
who displays throughout his book an utter lack of the sense of the
ridiculous, finds the scene between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger
in _The Lady from the Sea_ ridiculous, a scene which thousands of
audiences have followed in breathless silence and with deep emotion.
The puzzle is why Nordau is so anxious to show that Ibsen is not a
realist, and how his not being a realist can possibly be construed into
an argument in favour of his insanity. Are then all the people who, as
a matter of taste or as a matter of business, supply the public with
unrealistic dramas to be considered more or less demented? If this is
the case, what becomes of the mental sanity of Nordau’s great model,
Goethe, the author of the intensely unreal _Faust_?
Referring to the theory of heredity, frequently alluded to in Ibsen’s
works, Nordau says he cannot preserve his gravity when Ibsen displays
his scientific or medical knowledge. Here again we are tempted to refer
to the sandal-maker and the sandal-strings; but there is actually no
occasion to do so, because Ibsen displaying his medical knowledge is a
picture conjured up by Nordau’s own imagination. We do not know what
Ibsen does in his private life, but in his dramatic works he does not
display his medical knowledge. What suits Nordau’s purpose to give
as Ibsen’s opinions are the opinions of his characters, who, being
true to nature, speak as their prototypes in reality speak. It suits
Ibsen’s dramatic purposes to make use of certain views on heredity,
and he is all the more entitled to do so as such opinions are very
prevalent nowadays, and not without exercising a considerable influence
on people’s minds. Ibsen may have exactly the same opinion as his
characters give expression to, or he may think the very opposite,
but those who thoroughly understand Ibsen’s method will be convinced
that he would not commit the mistake, so common among dramatists, of
allowing his characters to reflect the author’s personality. When
Regina, in _Ghosts_, in reply to Mrs. Alving, who is harping on
heredity, says, “What must be, must be... I take after my mother I dare
say,” she does not express Ibsen’s opinion about heredity, but that
fatalistic notion which is unfortunately extremely common among women,
especially when in trouble or at fault, and a reference to her mother
is only a confirmation of her fatalistic belief, at which she clutches
that she may rid herself of her responsibility.
If we must look for a tendency in Ibsen’s works, it might be found in
his attempt to show up this generally prevailing weakness in will and
character which Nordau himself finds everywhere and which he calls
degeneration. Regina, as well as Oswald, are “frightful examples” of
this weakness, and in placing them on the stage Ibsen has the same
object as Nordau, namely, to exhibit a deplorable defect in modern
society. Ibsen may therefore be looked upon as Nordau’s co-operator,
and even precursor, because Ibsen’s characters are types of that very
degeneration which Nordau desires to combat. In fact, the importance
that our alienist attaches to Ibsen’s characters suggests the idea
that if there were no Ibsen there would be no Nordau. By the aid of an
extremely confused and distorted reasoning, he condemns Ibsen for that
very weakness which he, like Nordau, has discovered in modern society
and incarnated in his characters as a warning to his contemporaries.
If we had not a strong objection to the _tu quoque_ argument, and were
not resolved to avoid it, we could here say a great deal about Nordau’s
condemnation of Ibsen’s supposed illogical references to heredity,
while Nordau himself yields to the temptation of using the absurdest
logic in order to discover supposed proofs in favour of his own pet
theories.
Even supposing that Ibsen did believe in heredity, is he not in harmony
with his time? One does not require to be an alienist or a biologist
to understand that the Darwinian theory of evolution is the theory of
heredity; and one does not require to be very old to have observed
that the characteristics of parents often repeat themselves in their
children. In his criticism of Ibsen, Nordau seems to go too far when
he casts discredit on the theory of heredity, with regard to which he
himself goes to an extreme when he attributes to heredity the lurking
belief in a personal God in the inmost recesses of the consciousness of
certain scientists. The manner in which he refers to little Hedwig’s
blindness will certainly induce his readers to infer that he himself
does not believe in cases of hereditary blindness—an affliction
which has however come within the knowledge of many. Nordau, in his
purposeless eagerness to tear Ibsen down from his pedestal, seems to
imagine that he would further his object if he could show that Ibsen
is influenced by the religion of his childhood, of his youth, and of
his country. To be influenced by such religion has been the case with
many sane people of strong mind, especially in countries where the
morality implanted in young children is based entirely on religious
instruction. Even when a man ceases to believe literally all that has
been taught him, it is natural that his religious thoughts should mould
themselves on the early impressions, which then become symbols instead
of fact. This is especially natural with people whose walk in life has
precluded them from giving that absorbing attention to psychology and
biology which to a sound mind is indispensable before it can master,
or believe, the scientists’ theories of “mechanical causality,” and
the annihilation of the conscious _Ego_. Nordau, like many other
scientific enthusiasts, seems to labour under the impression that all
the loud-voiced people, who affect complete irreligiosity, and who pose
as free-thinkers, are really convinced that the scientific discovery
of yesterday, which might be upset by the discovery of to-morrow,
sufficiently explains the world and themselves. This is far from being
the case. How often when we scratch the atheist do we not find the
superstitiously devout. How many men could be found in the world who
are so capable of satisfying all their curiosity regarding the unknown
by scientific theories that they might be quoted in support of the
artificiality of religious instincts? They would certainly number very
few. And yet scientists of Nordau’s stamp are apt to regard such men as
the only really sane ones, and the rest of humanity as to some extent
degenerate.
But how does Nordau know anything about Ibsen’s religious opinions? He
simply studies the characters in Ibsen’s pieces and takes for granted
that Ibsen must necessarily hold the same opinions as his characters.
This absurd assumption, indispensable to his purpose, leads him
sometimes into ridiculous dilemmas from which he escapes in a not less
ridiculous manner. When he finds that Ibsen has _dramatis personæ_ of
diametrically opposed opinions and beliefs, he does not know which
of them represents Ibsen’s opinions and Ibsen’s beliefs. Determined
not to notice the simple fact that none of them represent Ibsen’s
views, he falls back on the expediency of declaring that, because his
characters differ, Ibsen does not know his own mind, a fact which in
our alienist’s view points to degeneracy.
He quotes copiously from Ibsen’s pieces in order to show that those
characters who have committed evil deeds, without having resigned
themselves to being utterly bad, yearn for confession. From this
we must conclude that Nordau considers a longing for confession in
those who have sinned as an obsession and as pertaining to stigmata
of degeneration. To make capital out of this, Nordau sticks hard to
his assumption that Ibsen’s object is to preach some kind of creed by
proclaiming his own opinions through his characters. Few people in the
world really know what Ibsen’s final object and real aims are; but his
immediate object, it will be granted, is to show his contemporaries
what they really are, and so sternly and so cogently does he pursue
this object that, while other dramatists show their spectators the
defects of others, Ibsen lays bare their own.
In showing sinners’ yearnings for confession, Ibsen could not therefore
be wrong unless a longing for confession in sinners is unreal or
unusual. Far from being unusual, we find it in almost every human
being, from the innocent child down to the brutal criminal. The police
and law-court reports in England frequently relate cases in which
men and women confess crimes which would never have been discovered,
simply to satisfy a conscience yearning for confession. We have nothing
to do here with the question as to whether this first step towards a
better life is longed for in obedience to an instinct implanted in the
emotional nature of man by a Creator, or whether it is the consequence
of an inherited tendency originated by religious teaching and moral
civil laws. We have only to deal with the fact that the conscience of
all evil-doers, and especially of those who are willing to abandon
evil and return to good, prompts them to confess. Nordau has only to
consult a Catholic priest in order to learn how strong and general this
yearning is.
It must also be remembered that confession, if not to priests yet to
God, is part of the Lutheran creed prevailing in Norway, and that
consequently confession is regarded by the people as the test of
true repentance. Though auricular confession is not a sacrament in
the Lutheran Church, the Norwegian ministers could tell Nordau how
often sinners and criminals ease their consciences by confessing to
them. It is hardly possible to write a serious dramatic piece without
representing a struggle between good and evil. And how then could Ibsen
write dramas true to Norwegian life, without instancing that yearning
for confession which is the outward sign of the inward struggle between
good and evil?
Nordau instances the French assassin Avinain, who before being
guillotined gave out as his life’s motto “Never confess,” as an example
of a strong and healthy mind—or, at least, he regards this motto as one
which only a strong and healthy mind can follow. On the other hand, he
regards confessing men as men “in whom the mechanism of inhibition is
always disordered, and who therefore cannot escape from the impulse to
confess when anything of an absorbing or exciting character exists in
their consciousness.”
In this comparison Nordau omits the chief factor—the religious opinion,
or the philosophy which necessarily determines whether the confession
is a sign of strength or weakness. If the murderer Avinain was a
confirmed atheist, and if his emotional nature was such as to glorify
murder, then he had no impulse to confess, and consequently required no
strength of mind to resist confession. If the man who glories in what
is good—or, to use an expression of Nordau’s, who has social instincts,
and consequently believes that confession is his duty and an heroic
action—should shun the ordeal and prefer to spend the rest of his life
as a self-despising hypocrite, this would be weak-mindedness. Of course
Nordau may always argue that to believe in the good and in personal
responsibility is in itself a sign of degeneration. But this would be
simply to place the question on another plane, where we have already
discussed it.
What is said here about confession applies equally to what Nordau says
about redemption. It is not, as he states, an obsession of Ibsen’s, but
a symbol very natural to a people of strong religious feelings. His
characters could not possibly express their ideas and their emotions
in any other way than that in which they have been in the habit of
thinking all their lives.
Nordau cannot rid himself of the obsession that the dramatist must
necessarily take a side in the squabble between religion and science,
and between the devotees of different social panaceas, and seems
exasperated because he cannot get at Ibsen’s real opinion on such
questions. When he persists in his egregious error of taking the
opinions of Ibsen’s characters as those of Ibsen, his mind gets into
a maze, which leads him to the conclusion that it is Ibsen’s mind,
not his own, that has got into a confused state. It is very common to
find a man, who, by dint of study or by natural talent, has become an
authority on one subject, so far losing his power of self-criticism as
to believe himself a universal genius, capable of dogmatizing on every
subject under the sun. It is this conceit that induces successful
men to imagine that their natural specialty is not that one which has
rendered them famous, but some other specialty for which in reality
they have no aptitude whatever. A successful comedian believes himself
to be hardly dealt with because he is not acknowledged as a tragedian.
A musician considers himself an authority on the drama. The poet thinks
he ought to have been a politician. Biologists imagine they would shine
as social reformers.
It is because Ibsen has not yielded to this weakness, because he has
not the conceit to lay down the law on questions outside his own
province, but simply aspires to be a dramatist, that Nordau complains
so bitterly of Ibsen’s omission to express a distinct opinion on all
sorts of subjects on which Nordau burns to break a lance with him. He
tilts against the opinions expressed by Ibsen’s characters with the
wasted fury of Don Quixote attacking windmills.
We are at a loss to account for the contradictions of which Nordau
appears to be guilty. Much of what he says in the latter part of his
essay on Ibsen is in direct contradiction to what he says in the
earlier part, where his praise of Ibsen’s talents and abilities is
conspicuous. We will give an example of what we mean. He says at the
beginning of his chapter: “Each of the terse words which suffice him
[Ibsen] has something of the nature of a peep-hole, through which
limitless vistas are obtained.” Towards the end of it he says: “Thus
Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one
looks through the peep-hole, one sees at each shaking of the cardboard
tube new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this
toy, but adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass,
always the same, inserted haphazard and united into mystical figures by
three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless
arabesque.”
Can this contradiction be the result of his great trust in authorities,
and has he made use of two that clash, or does he write for writing’s
sake, differently each day according to the mood he happens to be in?
When Ibsen’s characters give expression to their yearnings for greater
personal liberty, for a revolt against social traditions which threaten
to wreck their lives, and which they have beheld wrecking the lives of
hundreds around them, they are intended by the dramatist to show what
is going on in modern society. Nordau of course concludes that Ibsen is
an egomaniac who resents any bonds on his worst instincts. Supposing
that Ibsen shares personally that same longing for more individual
freedom which Nordau so warmly deprecates, it is evident that they
differ simply because Nordau starts from the supposition that men’s
instincts are necessarily bad, and Ibsen from the supposition that they
are good.
The fundamental difference in opinion mainly springs from the different
circumstances amongst which the two men have been born and brought up.
The German, who has all his life been impressed with the necessity of
officialism and police government, who has lived under the impression
that his castle would be attacked by a lower caste when free to follow
its inclinations, would naturally attach great importance to existing
institutions. If he at the same time be illogical enough to sap at the
root of that great order-producing institution—religion—and beholds
that this safeguard is becoming more and more unreliable, he naturally
looks for something to take its place.
The German social system, so unjust to the working classes, has
naturally embittered the people and enlisted a number of working men
into the revolutionary parties, and this growing army of so-called
enemies to society naturally alarms the German middle-class man and
prejudices him against the proletariat. Passions and destructive
instincts, instilled by long suffering, he is apt to regard as human
nature from which the worst must be expected. This explains many
of Nordau’s contradictions. He wishes to abolish religion because
its abolition would glorify science, but he wishes to retain the
marriage laws because he fears that without them an unspeakable state
of immorality would ensue. He denies a divine plan in creation which
might account for the moral instinct in man, but he does not believe
that morality has sprung from the only remaining source, namely, man’s
experience of the advantages of morality. His habit of bowing to
authorities causes him to believe that morality and a pure family life
are the result of the marriage laws, and not that the marriage laws are
the result of man’s love of morality and of a pure family life.
The Norwegian is born and brought up in a country where liberty has
been the basis and safeguard of moral order; where few police are found
in the cities, and where, throughout vast tracts of country, man’s good
instincts are the only police; where the peasant and working classes
have no desire or intention to attack the wealthy; where the people
are religious because they are honest and not honest because they
are religious; where self-esteem and justice would take the place of
religion were it to crumble. The Norwegian has noticed that the poor
are more generous than the rich, that the people are more honest than
their officials, that the free man and woman are more moral than the
tied ones, and that liberty elevates and oppressive laws degrade. If
the Norwegian seems to attach little importance to legal marriage, it
is because, in cleansing it from mercenary considerations and other low
motives, he hopes to base it on such foundations as moral instinct,
love, self-respect, honour, and possibly on religious belief, and
thereby make it a life-long reality. It is not to gratify low instincts
and licentious passions, as Nordau would have it, that he wishes for
reform. He may be mistaken in his motives, but this is no excuse for
attributing vile motives to him.
Nordau is not the only one who is puzzled by the many peculiarities
of Ibsen’s plays. Like him, many English theatre-goers wonder why
his best types and his leading characters, as a rule, are so void of
nobility, fine feeling, and high principles; why he always places his
scenes in small towns, and not among the romantically wild country
and the picturesque peasants, as Björnsen and Jonas Lie have often
done; why he represents the so-called respectable and official classes
in so unfavourable a light; why his women seem to be morally and
intellectually superior to his men.
In order to elucidate these questions and many other peculiarities
in Ibsen’s plays and characters, as well as some of the reasons why
a German critic should disapprove of Ibsen, it should be remembered
that in Norway two cultures have met and struggled—the German and
Scandinavian—but have not blended.
Of the Scandinavian nations, the Norwegians may be considered as the
extreme type. While they differ from the Danes and Swedes considerably,
they differ still more from the Germans. Their characteristics arise
not only from race, but largely from surroundings and modes of life.
The genuine Norwegian people have of old lived scattered over a vast
area of country, separated by high fjelds and broad fjords, foaming
torrents and dense woods, only sparingly communicating with each other,
and still less with strangers, and hearing little of the outside world,
they have grown into a silent, thinking, and deep-feeling nation.
They have inherited from the old Viking times an unquenchable love of
liberty, and all their institutions, their customs, their principles,
have developed in freedom, and such virtues as they have and of
which they are most proud, are the outcome of personal independence.
Accustomed to personal danger on the snow-clad mountain-paths, in the
vast forests, and in small open boats upon the stormy fjords, they
have acquired an extraordinary degree of self-reliance. Unused to,
and distrustful of, foreign ways, and seldom successful in foreign
countries, they harbour an intense love of Norway and for anything
Norwegian; and while they may conceitedly think that everything that
is Norwegian is great and noble, they certainly endeavour to put a
stamp of nobility and greatness on everything that is Norwegian. They
are proud, generous, loyal, hospitable, and can never be persuaded
that lowly circumstances or poverty could possibly be an excuse for an
unroyal conduct.
Born and bred amid snow-capped mountains, deep valleys, perpendicular
rocks, a jagged, stormy coast—the whole wearing an air of solemn
and lonely grandeur—the Norwegians are a meditative and highly
imaginative people. The stirring natural phenomena peculiar to the
country cannot fail to stimulate their imagination. The snow-storms,
the ice-avalanches, the light summer nights, the brilliant moonlight
diffused over the abrupt mountains, the dark forests and the glittering
fjords, the raging storms from the Atlantic, the flaming midnight
winter skies, the sunsets which so wondrously illumine the whole
coast-line—such scenes, such pictures, sink into their minds and
quicken their emotions.
What wonder, then, if they are full of folk-lore and the supernatural
has for them an irresistible charm? They are superstitious, and believe
that their actions and lives are influenced by gnomes, fairies, and
trolls. Old heathen ceremonies for the propitiation of the spirits are
still in vogue. They are deeply moved by music and poetry, and have a
strong predilection for all that is heroic and great.
It is not surprising that in German translations of Norwegian
writings—for which Nordau blames Ibsen’s degeneracy—adjectives should
have taken a new meaning; for in Norway they have been influenced by
nature’s grandeur. When Norwegians say “great,” they mean great as the
fjeld, great as the boundless ocean; when they say “silent,” they mean
silent as the wood in the short summer night. Consequently, when a
man, an action, a thing, is described to them, they are apt to measure
it by the standard of nature’s extremes around them. They are always
disappointed when they behold the wonders of civilization described to
them as great and wonderful. They would call the ruins of the Coliseum
mean, and think no more of the pyramids than of ant-hills. Their ideas
of a great man could probably never be realized, and their wonder is
considerable at finding the mighty lords of England so unlike demi-gods.
It was the Hanseatic League that brought this stern and haughty people
into contact with German culture. This remarkable federation of
enterprising German merchants discovered that profits could be made out
of the rough products of Norway, and they founded a German colony in
Bergen, which rose to considerable importance. German traders gradually
settled in all the other important Norwegian centres, and the whole
commercial life of Norway became more or less Germanized.
At the time Germany was far ahead of Norway in everything appertaining
to industry, and was already then bent on doing business with foreign
countries by offering them a mass of German manufactured goods of
attractive appearance, but of little value, and not indispensable
to a people like the Norwegians. Competition was already severe in
Germany, money had acquired an immense importance, success in life
was most easily attained by intense application to business, saving,
and grinding. The German traders stood in the same relation to the
Norwegians as that in which English traders stand to the native races
whom they first approach for business purposes. The traders and agents
who went as far as Norway—a long distance before the days of steamers
and railways—were daring and reckless men, bent upon making money,
just as the pioneers of British commerce were and are in Africa. What
interested them was not the great and noble aspect of the Norwegian
character, but the desire on the part of these people to buy gewgaws,
and the facility with which they parted with their money and their
goods.
Though Norway is a poor country, it yielded to the not over-ambitious
Germans a satisfactory harvest, and a great number of them settled
permanently in the Norwegian towns. They became sufficiently numerous
and influential to impress a German stamp on Norwegian urban life, on
the people who worked and lived with them; and these became Germanized
to no small extent.
These middle-class Germans were no doubt excellent, respectable people
in their way, but they had little in common with the Norwegian country
folk. They were better educated, they had more worldly wisdom, their
experience in their own cities had trained them to subject their
emotional nature to their intellect. In order to push on to success in
their German communities, where antagonistic and powerful magnates left
but little scope for daring and straightforwardness, they had learned
to value diplomacy and discretion.
They had no sympathies with the natives, whom they regarded as
semi-barbarians, and all their intercourse with them was diplomatic and
insincere, and their sole motive was profit. The honesty, the pride,
the generosity of the Norwegian peasantry were well known to them, but
they took advantage of these characteristics, which they regarded as
expensive luxuries.
The cities however became the seats of the educational establishments,
and the Norwegian youth who were intended for the professions came to
the cities and mingled there with the German element. On the other
hand, the sons of the citizens went into the country in professional
capacities and created there a middle class strongly impregnated with
German culture. In this manner a sharp line of demarcation arose
between the upper and middle classes on the one hand and the peasantry
on the other, the former being strongly influenced by German culture,
the latter clinging tenaciously to the Norwegian.
It is no slur on the German character and German culture to say that it
involved degeneration in no small degree. It partook of the drawbacks
of our civilization, and what happened in Norway has happened in every
country where modern civilization has come into contact with nations
whose virtues and noble qualities have rested as much on ignorance and
the absence of temptation as on inborn worth. Thanks to the historical
development we have indicated, the Norwegian upper and middle
classes, as well as the whole of the urban populations, developed
characteristics which drew upon them the contempt of the peasants.
Their eagerness for profit, their love of money, their indifference
to the great, the noble, and the beautiful, their cringing attitude
towards authorities and towards the wealthy, their sacrifice of public
interests to private welfare, their susceptibility to the influence of
foreign fashion, manners, and vices,—all this tended to lower the upper
and middle classes in the eyes of the peasants.
When the phenomenon witnessed in all civilized countries—the
impoverishment of the masses—made its appearance, public-spirited
men began to inquire as to the causes. It was in the middle of this
century, when a spirit of revolution and reform was abroad, that the
yearning for a better state of things began to manifest itself. There
were no aristocracy, no established Church, and no privileged class to
blame for the unsatisfactory state of the country, and consequently
the investigators turned their attention to the ethical condition of
the people themselves. Comparison between the olden and the modern
times was instituted. The discrepancy between the two classes became
striking, and the corrupting influences were traced to the towns. A
strong desire to revive and strengthen the old culture took possession
of many men and women, who, though educated, had a keen sympathy with
the peasants. To found the future development of Norway on the basis of
the old Norwegian culture became the object of a new national party,
including some of the best elements of the Norwegian nation. These
enthusiasts found their expression in composers like Tjerulf, and in
the writings of men like Björnstjerne Björnsen, Jonas Lie, and Ibsen.
The greatest mistake of these writers—the one that has entirely escaped
Nordau—is their belief that a nation can realize its best aspirations
by methods that have utterly failed in the celestial empire of China.
The hope of preserving the grand feature of the old Norwegian culture
by exclusiveness, by isolating Norway, and by offering a stubborn
resistance to foreign influence, be it good or bad—in this they
have set themselves an impossible task. A thorough national life and
development produced by such artificial means would, even if attended
by the highest degree of success, partake of a theatrical nature. The
more it succeeded, the more it would attract foreigners, and features
which in olden times sprang from the character of the people and from
natural circumstances, would fall into the line of carnivals organized
at the expense of the municipalities and of railways to Alpine summits.
These Norwegian enthusiasts have yet to learn that though foreign
tourists, foreign literature, and foreign art place temptations in the
way of their single-minded nation, there are in every country large
numbers of people who fight for progress as sedulously as themselves,
and whose co-operation would outweigh the dangers of European
modernity. In the old culture, in the past life of nations, especially
in nations like Norway, there are great virtues and noble features
which may well serve as a goal. But to again render them a reality, to
base them on lasting foundations, a people must pass through the fiery
trials of modern temptations, and, instead of yielding plastically to
outward circumstances, must shape their destiny through sheer strength
of character. What Norway has of good and noble she should give to
other nations, and freely accept their best from them. This is an
exchange which, like mercy, blesses both giver and receiver.
Though the struggle against degeneration is, in Norway, hampered by the
national prejudices of the leaders, it is still progressing. Ibsen’s
mission in the fight is to ruthlessly expose the stagnant pools of
corruption. He finds them in the cities and among the middle class,
where the old German Philistine features have been most distinctly
preserved. Many of his characters bear German names, and those who
take the part of the traditional villain wear often the garb of that
respectable, common-sense, matter-of-fact, self-absorbed German whom
Nordau would exempt from any stigma of degeneration.
Thorvald Helmer, in _The Doll’s House_, has, or would have, the
sympathies of millions, not in Germany alone, but in England and
everywhere, of people whose emotional nature, whose love for the high
and noble, has been compressed by that worldly wisdom which in our
large crowded cities becomes prudence, and to obey which is often a
duty—people who are not aware that it is not only possible, but even
easy, to be both diplomatic and discreet in obedience to noble emotions
and exalted aspirations, and that to root these out of our nature is
degeneration.
Helmer, in his sleek reasonableness, is an excellent type of meanness,
and his character is brought out in a consummately artistic way. It
exasperates Nordau that this man, who comes so near his standard of
sound-mindedness, should inspire in audiences all the world over,
especially in the female element, a sense of aversion, apparently
without any effort on the part of the author. Helmer has a keen eye
for the main chance. His reputation and his position have his first
consideration. He trembles at the idea of fighting the world without
them. His love of his wife is the quintessence of selfishness. He
loves her in the two only ways which Nordau thinks reasonable in a
human being, as a companion, as a pleasant thing to toy with; and as
the female of his race, at such periods when he, as the normal man of
Nordau, is actuated by animal impulses—for example, under the influence
of champagne. Of the pure love for a woman which in a man’s heart
remains as a spring of living water, giving him a pang of joy each
time his thoughts revert to her, and which casts a rosy tint of poetry
over life, nay even over death—of such love Helmer is as incapable as
Nordau’s normal man.
Nora yearns for the higher, nobler love, and her lack of experience in
character-study has left her in doubt, though in hope, regarding her
husband. The moment comes when she gains certitude; and when Helmer
reveals himself in his Philistine hideousness, her spirit revolts.
Though of course exaggerated for the sake of dramatic effect, she
is a good type of an intelligent and emotional Norwegian woman.
Norwegian girls receive a great deal of instruction, and as they have
no professions to prepare for, their education is more literary and
artistic than that of the men. They read voraciously the Norwegian
modern writers, and sympathize consequently more than the men with
the extreme nationalists. They are often strongly possessed by the
_Aand_—that indefinable yearning for all that is great and noble—in
Norwegian culture already alluded to. They have a fair knowledge of
foreign literature, and read a great many English novels. With their
admiration for English pure love, for English home life, grafted on the
grand aspirations which the new _Aand_ fosters, they may well appear
uncanny and troll-like to the prosaic German.
We trust that the struggle between the Norwegian and the German
cultures, of which we have endeavoured to give an idea, will make it
easier for students of Ibsen to understand his characters. It is in
_The Doll’s House_ where the two inimical cultures are most clearly
personified, the old Norwegian culture being represented by the
uncompromising, impulsive, and intense Nora, and the imported German
culture by the pedantic, commonplace, and animal Helmer.
If our interpretation is right, it is impossible that Ibsen’s work
could in any way indicate degeneration. It ought, on the contrary,
to be evident that his pieces, rendering objective as they do
the struggle for a higher and better life, based not on pedantic
considerations of immediate and unworthy advantages, but on the noble
impulses of a strong and healthy nation, are at once a summons to rise
higher, and signals pointing the way.