first work in which Ibsen’s characteristic modern tone appears, not
again to vanish. It is a satire on the various conventional phases
of love, exquisite in form but comparatively slight in texture. In
“Brand” Ibsen produced a poem which for imagination and sombre energy
stands alone. It is perhaps the most widely known of all his works; in
Germany it has already found four translators, and there is reason to
hope that before long a translation will appear in England. “Brand” is
the tragedy of will and self-sacrifice in the service of the ideal--a
narrow ideal, but less narrow, Ibsen seems sometimes to hint, than the
ideals of most of us. The motto on which Brand acts in all the crises
of his life is, “All or nothing;” and with him it means in every case
the crushing of some human emotion or relationship for the fulfilment
of a religious duty. Soon after the commencement of the poem Brand
became the pastor of a gloomy little northern valley, between mountains
and glaciers, into which the sun seldom penetrates. He is accompanied
by his wife Agnes, a pathetic image of love and devotion. A child is
born to them, but soon dies in this sun-forsaken valley. There are few
passages in literature of more penetrating pathos than the scene in the
fourth act in which, one Christmas eve, the first anniversary of the
child’s death, Brand persuades Agnes to give her Alf’s clothes--the
last loved relics--to a beggar-woman who comes to the door with her
child during a snowstorm. Soon Agnes also dies. In the end, stoned
by his flock, Brand makes his way, bleeding, up into the mountains.
Here, amid the wild rocks and his own hallucinations, he is met by a
mad girl who mistakes him for the thorn-crowned Christ. This scene, in
which, overwhelmed at last by an avalanche, Brand dies amid his broken
ideals, attains an imaginative height not elsewhere reached in modern
literature, and for the like of which we have to look back to the great
scene on the heath in “Lear.” Here and elsewhere, however, Ibsen brings
in supernatural voices, which scarcely heighten the natural grandeur
of the scene, and which seem out of place altogether in a poem so
entirely modern. “Brand” brings before us a wealth of figures and of
discussions, carried on in brief, clear, musical, though irregular,
metrical form, and it would be impossible to analyze so complex a work
within moderate compass.
“Peer Gynt,” is regarded in his own country as Ibsen’s most important
achievement, for it is a great modern national epic, the Scandinavian
“Faust.” A successful attempt has even been made to represent it on the
stage, the incidental music being composed by Grieg. The name of its
hero and many incidents in his career have their home in old Norwegian
folk-lore, and Ibsen has himself declared that Peer Gynt is intended
as the representative of the Norwegian people. Peer is the child of
imagination who lives in a world in which fantasy and reality can
scarcely be distinguished. He is an egoist with colossal ambitions;
at the same time he is by no means wanting in worldly wisdom; he goes
to America, and makes a large fortune (later on suddenly lost) by the
importation of slaves and the exportation of idols to China, a trade
which he reconciles to his conscience by opening up another branch of
business for supplying missionaries (at a considerable profit) with
Bibles and rum. The whole is a series of scenes and adventures, often
fantastic or symbolic in character, always touched by that profound
irony which is Ibsen’s most marked feature. One scene is so original
and penetrative that it stands alone in literature. It is that scene of
peculiarly Norwegian essence in which Peer Gynt enters the hut in which
his mother lies dying, with the fire on the hearth and the old tom-cat
on a stool at the bottom of the bed. He talks to her in the tone of the
days of childhood, reminding her how they used to play at driving to
the fairy-tale castle of Soria Moria. He sits at the foot of the bed,
throws a string round the stool on which the cat lies, takes a stick in
his hand, imagines a journey to Heaven--the altercation with St. Peter
at the gate, the deep bass voice of God declaring that Mother Aase
shall enter free--and lulls her to death with the stories with which
she had once lulled him to sleep. At a much later date in his career
Peer finds himself in a madhouse at Cairo, where he is assured that
his own guiding principle of the self-sufficiency of the individual,
without regard for the actions or opinions of others, is carried out to
its extreme limits. He is here acclaimed as emperor and crowned with a
garland of straw. Thus are his dreams of power fulfilled. In the end he
returns, a white-haired old man, to be eagerly welcomed by the faithful
Solveig, whom, as a girl, he had forsaken, and who is now an old woman,
still waiting for him with the kingdom of love that he had missed.
The poem ends with the picture of Solveig singing over her lover a
cradle-song of death. The failure of an over-mastering imagination and
weak will to attain the love that alone satisfies, that is the last
lesson of this marvellous work, so full of manifold meaning.
It is certainly by the third and latest group--the Social Dramas--that
Ibsen has attracted most attention both in his own country and abroad.
They are all written in mature life, and he has here devoted his early
acquired mastery of the technical requirements of the drama, as well
as the later acquired experiences of men, to a keen criticism of the
social life of to-day. He himself, it is said, regards these plays
as his chief title to remembrance. It is scarcely possible to say so
much as this when we think of “Hærmændene paa Helgeland,” of “Brand,”
and of “Peer Gynt.” But it certainly does not befit us of to-day to
complain that Ibsen has devoted his most mature art to work which has
a significance which to-day at all events cannot be over-estimated.
That significance may be very easily set forth; the spirit that works
through Ibsen’s latest dramas is the same that may be detected in
his earliest, “Catilina;” it is an eager insistance that the social
environment shall not cramp the reasonable freedom of the individual,
together with a passionately intense hatred of all those conventional
lies which are commonly regarded as “the pillars of society.” But this
impulse that underlies nearly all Ibsen’s dramas of the last group is
always under the control of a great dramatic artist. The dialogue is
brief and incisive; every word tells, and none is superfluous; there
is no brilliant play of dialogue for its own sake. “The illusion I
wish to produce,” he has himself said, “is that of truth itself,
I want to produce upon the reader the impression that what he is
reading is actually taking place before him.” In the hands of a meaner
artist such an attempt would be fatal; to Ibsen it has brought greater
strength. If there is fault to find in the construction of Ibsen’s
prose dramas, it lies in their richness of material; the subsidiary
episodes are frequently dramas in themselves, although duly subordinate
to the main purpose of the play. The care lavished on the development
and episodes of these dramas is equalled by the reality and variety
of the persons presented. These are never mere embodied “humours” or
sarcastic caricatures; the terrible keenness of Ibsen’s irony comes of
the simple truth and moderation with which he describes these social
humbugs who are yet so eminently reasonable and like ourselves. Every
figure brought before us, even the most insignificant, is an organic
and complex personality, to be recognized without trick or catchword.
“The Young Men’s League,” the earliest of the series, deals with the
rise and progress of one Stensgaard. He is a man whose character is
essentially vulgar and commonplace, but who is undoubtedly clever, and
whose ambition it is to gain political success. At the same time he
is short-sighted, conceited, absolutely wanting in tact. He is even
unstable, save in the great central aim of his life, which he seeks
to bring about by the formation of a compact majority of voters, of
which the nucleus is the Young Men’s League. Stensgaard is always
at his best as an orator; he is a Numa Roumestan, genial, almost
childishly open-hearted, with a flow of facile emotion and a great
mastery of phrases. We leave him under a cloud of contempt but nowise
defeated; and we are given to understand that he is on his way to
the highest offices of state. In this vivid and skilful portrait of
the representative leader of semi-democratized societies, Ibsen has
given his chief utterance on current political methods. It is scarcely
favourable. He realizes that government by party mobs, each headed by
a Stensgaard--a phase in the progress towards complete democratization
illustrated in England to-day--is by no means altogether satisfactory.
“A party,” remarks Dr. Stockmann, in “An Enemy of Society,” “is like
a sausage-machine: it grinds all the heads together in one mash.”
Something more fundamental even than party government is needed, and
in some words written in 1870 Ibsen has briefly expressed what he
conceives to be the pith of the matter:--
“The coming time--how all our notions will fall into the dust then!
And truly it is high time. All that we have lived on up till now has
been the remnants of the revolutionary dishes of the last century, and
we have been long enough chewing these over and over again. Our ideas
demand a new substance and a new interpretation. Liberty, equality, and
fraternity are no longer the same things that they were in the days of
the blessed guillotine; but it is just this that the politicians will
not understand, and that is why I hate them. These people only desire
partial revolutions, revolutions in externals, in politics. But these
are mere trifles. There is only one thing that avails--to revolutionize
people’s minds.”
He is not an aristocrat of the school of Carlyle, eager to put
everything beneath the foot of a Cromwell or a Bismarck. The great
task for democracy is, as Rosmer says in “Rosmersholm,” “to make every
man in the land a nobleman.” “The State must go!” Ibsen wrote to G.
Brandes in 1870. “That will be a revolution which will find me on its
side. Undermine the idea of the State, set up in its place spontaneous
action, and the idea that spiritual relationship is the only thing that
makes for unity, and you will start the elements of a liberty which
will be something worth possessing.” It is only by the creation of
great men and women, by the enlargement to the utmost of the reasonable
freedom of the individual, that the realization of Democracy is
possible. And herein, as in other fundamental matters, Ibsen is at one
with the American, with whom he would appear at first sight to have
little in common. “Where the men and women think lightly of the laws;
... where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity
of elected persons; ... where outside authority enters always after
the precedence of inside authority; where the citizen is always the
head and ideal; where children are taught to be laws to themselves; ...
there the great city stands!” exclaims Walt Whitman.
In “The Pillars of Society”--which was separated from “The Young Men’s
League” by the appearance of “Emperor and Galilean”--Ibsen pours
delicious irony on those conventional lies which are regarded as the
foundations of social and domestic life. Here also he presents us with
one of the most eminent of the group of “governors, teachers, spiritual
pastors and masters” that throughout these plays strive to act as the
pillars of the social system. Straamand in “Love’s Comedy,” Manders
in “Ghosts,” the schoolmaster, Rörlund, here, with many minor figures
scattered through other plays, notwithstanding slight differences, are
closely allied. The clergyman is for Ibsen the supreme representative
and exponent of conventional morality. Yet the dramatist never falls
into the mistake of some of his Scandinavian contemporaries who make
their clerical figures mere caricatures. Here, as always, it is
because it is so reasonable and truthful that Ibsen’s irony is so
keen. Rörlund is honest and conscientious, but the thinnest veils of
propriety are impenetrable to him; he can see nothing but the obvious
and external aspects of morality; he is incapable of grasping a new
idea, or of sympathizing with any natural instinct or generous emotion;
it is his part to give utterance, impressive with the sanction of
religion, to the traditional maxims of the society he morally supports.
Pastor Manders, in “Ghosts,” is less fluent than Rörlund, and of
stronger character. His training and experience have fitted him to deal
in all dignity with the proprieties and conventions of social morality;
but when he is in the presence of the realities of life, or when a
generous human thought or emotion flashes out before him, he shrinks
back, shocked and cowed. He is then, as Mrs. Alving says, nothing but
a great child. That Ibsen is, in his clerical personages, as some have
said, covertly attacking Protestantism, it is not necessary to assert.
It is the traditional morality, of which the priesthood everywhere
are the chief and authorized exponents, with which he is chiefly
concerned. His attitude towards Christianity generally we may perhaps
gather from the intensity of feeling with which Julian, in “Emperor and
Galilean,” expresses his passionate repugnance to its doctrine of the
evil of human nature and its policy of suppression. “You can never
understand it, you,” he continues, “who have never been in the power of
this God-Man. It is more than a doctrine which he has spread over the
world; it is a charm which has fettered the senses. Whoever falls once
into his hands--I think he never becomes free again. We are like vines
planted in a foreign soil; plant us back again and we should perish;
yet we languish in this new earth.”
“A Doll’s House” contains Ibsen’s most elaborate portrait of a woman,
and it is his chief contribution to the elucidation of the questions
relating to the social functions and position of women in the modern
world. It is the tragedy of marriage, and on this ground it has excited
much discussion, and is perhaps the most widely known of Ibsen’s social
dramas. As a work of art it is probably the most perfect of them. He
has here thrown off the last fragments of that conventionality in
treatment which frequently mars the two previous plays, and has reached
the full development of his own style. The play is an organic whole,
all its parts are intimately bound together, and every step in the
development is vital and inevitable. Nora herself, the occupant of the
doll’s house, is a being whose adult instincts have been temporarily
arrested by the influences which have made her an overgrown child.
She is the daughter of a frivolous official of doubtful honesty;
she has been fed on those maxims of conventional morality of which
Rörlund is so able an exponent; and her chief recreation has been in
the servants’ room. She is now a mother, and the wife of a man who
shields her carefully from all contact with the world. He refrains
from sharing with her his work or his troubles; he fosters all her
childish instincts; she is a source of enjoyment to him, a precious
toy. He is a man of æsthetic tastes, and his love for her has something
of the delight that one takes in a work of art. Nora’s conduct is the
natural outcome of her training and experience. She tells lies with
facility; she flirts almost recklessly to attain her own ends; when
money is concerned her conceptions of right are so elementary that she
forges her father’s name. But she acts from the impulses of a loving
heart; her motives are always good; she is not conscious of guilt. Her
education in life has not led her beyond the stage of the affectionate
child with no sense of responsibility. But the higher instincts are
latent within her; and they awake when the light of day at length
penetrates her doll’s house, and she learns the judgment of the world,
of which her husband now stands forth as the stern interpreter. In the
clash and shock of that moment she realizes that her marriage has been
no marriage, that she has been living all these years with a “strange
man,” and that she is no fit mother for her children. She leaves her
home, not to return until, as she says, to live with her husband will
be a real marriage. Will she ever return?--The Norwegian poets, it has
been said, like to end their dramas, as such end in life, with a note
of interrogation.
Nora is one of a group of women, more or less highly developed,
who are distributed throughout Ibsen’s later plays. They stand, in
their stagnant conventional environment, as, either instinctively or
intelligently, actually or potentially, the representatives of freedom
and truth; they contain the promise of a new social order. The men
in these plays, who are able to estimate their social surroundings
at a just value, have mostly been wounded or paralyzed in the battle
of life; they stand by, half-cynical, and are content to be merely
spectators. But the women--Selma, Lona, Nora, Mrs. Alving, Rebecca--are
full of unconquerable energy. There is a new life in their breasts that
surges, often tumultuously, into very practical expression.
As “The Doll’s House” is the tragedy of marriage, so “Ghosts” is the
tragedy of heredity. This wonderful play is the logical outcome and
continuation of “The Doll’s House.” Mrs. Alving is a Nora who had
resolved to cling to her husband in spite of all, and here is the
result. She is a woman of energy and intellect, who has managed the
estate, and devoted herself successfully to the task of creating an
artificial odour of sanctity around the memory of her late husband.
At the same time she has been gradually throwing aside the precepts
of the morality in which she has been educated, and has learned to
think for herself. When her son Oswald returns home, in reality dying
of disease that has been latent from his birth, he seems to her the
ghost of his father. His own life has been free from excess, but he
now drinks too much; and he begins to make love to the girl who is
really his half-sister, exactly as his father had done to her mother
in the same place. The scene finally closes over the first clear signs
of his madness. The irony of the play is chiefly brought about by
the involuntary agency of Pastor Manders, the consummate flower of
conventional morality, and in the few hours which the action covers
the tragedy of heredity is slowly and relentlessly unfolded, with the
vanity of all efforts to conceal or suppress the great natural forces
of life.
In “Ghosts,” it seems to me, Ibsen reached the highest point of his
art. He deals here with commonplace characters and everyday scenes;
most of the action is conveyed in mere drawing-room dialogue; but
we feel how the clearness and completeness of this play, its tragic
intensity, its immense concentration, have at the back the whole of
Ibsen’s various achievement. When we reach the end we experience
that prolonged shudder of horror, in which, as Aristotle said, the
purification of tragedy lies, and we involuntarily recall whatever is
most awful in literature, the “Oresteia” of Æschylus, Shakespeare’s
“Macbeth,” Shelley’s “Cenci.” It is only on more intimate acquaintance
that we are able to look beyond the horror of it, and that we realize
here, better than elsewhere, how Ibsen has absorbed the scientific
influences of his time, the attitude of unlimited simplicity and trust
in the face of reality. “I almost think,” Mrs. Alving says, “that we
are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders. It is not only what we have
inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us,--it is all
sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs and so forth. They have
no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid
of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see ghosts gliding
between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick
as the sand of the sea.” There is the absolute acceptance of facts,
however disagreeable. But, beside it, is the hope that lies in the
skilful probing of the wound that the ignorant have foolishly smothered
up; the hope also that lies in a glad trust of nature and of natural
instincts. Nowhere else in Ibsen’s work can we feel so strong and
invigorating a breath of new life.
“An Enemy of Society” is closely connected in its origin with
“Ghosts.” When “Ghosts” was published it aroused fierce antagonism.
Such a subject was not suited, it was said, to artistic treatment.
The discussion was foolish enough; the wise saying of Goethe still
remains true, that “no real circumstance is unpoetic so long as the
poet knows how to use it.” All the worthy people, however, in whose
name Pastor Manders is entitled to speak, declared, further, that the
play was immoral--as it certainly is from their point of view--and
it was some time before its first representation on the stage, with
the distinguished northern actor, Lindberg, in the part of Oswald.
Ibsen had expected a storm, but the storm was even greater than he
had anticipated; and in the history of Dr. Stockmann he has given an
artistic version of his own experiences at this time. It is pleasant
that the only figure in these plays that we can intimately associate
with Ibsen himself is that of the manly and genial Stockmann. When
he discovers that the water at the Baths, of which he is the medical
director, and which are the chief cause of the town’s prosperity, are
infected and producing disastrous results to the invalids, he resolves
that the matter shall at once be made known and remedied. It is in the
shock of the universal disapprobation that this resolution arouses that
our genial and homely doctor is lifted into heroism, and becomes the
mouthpiece of truths with far-reaching significance. The great scene
in the fourth act, in which he calls a public meeting as the only
remaining way to make his discovery public, and, amid general clamour,
sets forth his opinions, is one of the most powerful and genuinely
dramatic that Ibsen has ever written.
“The Wild Duck” is, as a drama, the least remarkable of Ibsen’s plays
of this group. There is no central personage who absorbs our attention,
and no great situation. For the first time also we detect a certain
tendency to mannerism, and the dramatist’s love of symbolism, here
centred in the wild duck, becomes obtrusive and disturbing. Yet this
play has a distinct and peculiar interest for the student of Ibsen’s
works. The satirist who has so keenly pursued others has never spared
himself; in the lines that he has set at the end of the charming little
volume in which he has collected his poems, he declares that, “to write
poetry is to hold a doomsday over oneself.” Or, as he has elsewhere
expressed it: “All that I have written corresponds to something that
I have lived through, if not actually experienced. Every new poem has
served as a spiritual process of emancipation and purification.” In
both “Brand” and “Peer Gynt” we may detect this process. In “The Wild
Duck” Ibsen has set himself on the side of his enemies, and written,
as a kind of anti-mask to “The Doll’s House” and “The Pillars of
Society,” a play in which, from the standpoint to which the dramatist
has accustomed us, everything is topsy-turvy. Gregers Werle is a
young man, possessing something of the reckless will-power of Brand,
who is devoted to the claims of the ideal, and who is doubtless an
enthusiastic student of Ibsen’s social dramas. On returning home after
a long absence he learns that his father has provided for a cast-off
mistress by marrying her to an unsuspecting man who is an old friend
of Gregers’. He resolves at once that it is his duty at all costs to
destroy the element of falsehood in this household, and to lay the
foundations of a true marriage. His interference ends in disaster;
the weak average human being fails to respond properly to “the claims
of the ideal;” while Werle’s father, the chief pillar of conventional
society in the play, spontaneously forms a true marriage, founded on
mutual confessions and mutual trust. If the play may be regarded, not
quite unfairly, as a burlesque of possible deductions from the earlier
plays, it witnesses also, like “Ghosts,” to Ibsen’s profound conviction
that all vital development must be spontaneous and from within,
conditioned by the nature of the individual.