Inquiries and Opinions

by Brander Matthews

IV

In spite of Ibsen's ten years of apprenticeship in two theaters, in daily contact with the practical business of the stage, it was not with prose-dramas of contemporary life that he first came forward as a dramatist. In fact, his juvenile 'Katilina' (1850) was written when he was but just of age, before he was attached to the theater professionally, before he had read any dramatists except Holberg and Öhlenschläger, and before he had had the chance to see much real acting on the stage itself. It was while he was engaged in producing the plays of others that he brought out also his own 'Mistress Inger at Ostraat' (1855), and the 'Vikings at Helgeland' (1858), both of them actable and often acted. They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and now Hugo.

'Mistress Inger' is a historical melodrama, with a gloomy castle, spectral pictures and secret passages, with shifting conspiracies, constant mystery-mongering and contorted characters. The inexpert playwright uses soliloquy not merely to unveil the soul of the speaker (its eternally legitimate use), but also to convey information to the audience as to the facts of the intrigue (an outworn expedient Ibsen never condescended to use in the later social dramas). The plot of 'Mistress Inger' is not veracious or convincing or even plausible; and the play lacks the broad simplicity of story to be found in the later 'Vikings,' a saga-like drama, a tale of blood and fate, which recalls Wagnerian opera in its primitive massiveness, in the vigor of its legend, in its tragic pathos, and in its full-blooded characters larger than life and yet pitifully human. Power again there is in a third drama dealing with the historic past of Norway, the 'Pretenders' (1864), which has a savage nobility of spirit. It is true that the masterful figure of Bishop Nicholas is enigmatic enough to have stalked out of one of Hugo's lyrical melodramas, but to counterbalance this there is a pithy wisdom in the talk of the Skald which one would seek in vain in the French romanticist drama.

Nowadays many of us are inclined to regard the historical drama as a bastard form and to agree with Maeterlinck in dismissing even the most meritorious attempts as "artificial poems that arise from the impossible marriage of past and present." Already between the 'Vikings' and the 'Pretenders' had Ibsen undertaken a play dealing with contemporary social usages. 'Love's Comedy' (1862) made its way on the stage; and it has found an English translator. But in this rendering it reveals itself as an attempt to commingle romance and satire; it appears to us as hopelessly unfunny; and there is an artistic inconsistency between a stern realism seeking to handle actual life with rigorous tensity and a soaring idealism which keeps obtruding itself.

'Love's Comedy' is in verse, irregular and rimed, well-nigh impossible to render satisfactorily into another tongue. Ibsen never again undertook to use rime or even meter in handling the manners of his own time. "I cannot believe that meter will be employed to any considerable extent in the drama of the near future, for the poetic intentions of the future cannot be reconciled with it," so Ibsen declared in 1883, thus passing judgment on 'Love's Comedy.' And he added that he had written scarcely any verse for years but "had exclusively cultivated the incomparably more difficult art of writing in the even, beautiful idiom of real life."

It was in 1857 that Björnson had put forth 'Synnöve Solbakken,' a mere novelet, it is true, but still the firstling of a native Norwegian literature, reproducing the very accent of the soil; and here we have once more an example of the way in which the novel is now continually affecting the development of the drama, as the play has in the past influenced the evolution of prose-fiction. For more than ten years Ibsen failed to see how much it would profit him to follow Björnson's lead. Between 'Love's Comedy' and the 'League of Youth' he put forth his two great dramatic poems, 'Brand' (1866) and 'Peer Gynt' (1867); and even after the 'League of Youth' (1869) had opened the series of modern social dramas, he published 'Emperor and Galilean' (1873) before resuming his incisive study of the life that lay around him.

The career of Julian the Apostate is sketched in what must be termed a chronicle-play, in two parts and in ten acts, a broadly brushed panorama of antique life, displaying Ibsen's abundant invention, his ability to handle boldly a large theme, his gift of putting characters erect on their feet with a few swift strokes. Altho 'Emperor and Galilean,' like 'Brand' and like 'Peer Gynt' was intended for the closet only, and not for the stage itself, it proves its author to be a true dramatist, centering the interest of his story on an essential struggle and keeping in view always the pictorial aspects of his action.

In this chronicle-play, as in his two greater dramatic poems, Ibsen reveals his perfect understanding of the practical necessities of the playhouse, even tho he did not choose always to conform to them. Then he turned his back on antiquity and faced the present in the series of prose-plays by which he is most widely known to actual playgoers. He found his characters and his themes in modern life and in his native land; and the social dramas followed one another in steady succession,—'Pillars of Society' (1877), 'A Doll's House' (1879), 'Ghosts' (1881), 'An Enemy of the People' (1882), the 'Wild Duck' (1884), 'Rosmersholm' (1886), the 'Lady from the Sea' (1888), 'Hedda Gabler' (1890), the 'Master-Builder' (1892), 'Little Eyolf' (1894), 'John Gabriel Borkman' (1896) and 'When We Dead Awaken' (1899).

As we look down this list, we see that it is perhaps unfair to class all the later plays as social dramas. Some of them, more especially the latest of them all, 'When We Dead Awaken,' seem to be symbolical rather than social, allegorical in intent even if they remain realistic in treatment. Brandes long ago declared that Ibsen had had a Pegasus killed under him; but when we consider the 'Lady from the Sea' and 'When We Dead Awaken' and perhaps one or two other of their later companions, we may well believe that the winged steed was not actually slain. Wounded it may have been, only to recover its strength again and to proffer its back once more for the poet to bestride.

V

These more poetic of Ibsen's plays in prose seem at times almost surcharged with a meaning which is nevertheless often so mockingly intangible and evasive, that we dare to wonder at last whether the secret they persist in hiding in this tantalizing fashion would really reward our efforts to grasp it; and we find comfort in Lowell's apt saying that "to be misty is not to be mystic." Ibsen is mystic, no doubt, but on occasion he can be misty also. And not only the plays that are merely misty but even those that are truly mystic, are less likely than the plainer-spoken social dramas to hold our attention in the theater itself, where the appeal is to the assembled multitude, and where all things need to be clearly defined so that the spectators can follow understandingly every phase of the changing action.

In the most of his social dramas Ibsen makes his meaning transparently clear; and there is never any undue strain on the attention of the average playgoer. Especially is he a master of the difficult art of exposition. It is the plain duty of the playwright to acquaint the audience with the antecedent circumstances upon which the plot is based,—to inform the spectators fully as to that part of the story which has gone before and which is not to be displayed in action on the stage,—to explain the relation of the several characters to each other,—and to arouse interest in what is about to happen. Scribe, than whom no one ever had a wider knowledge of the necessities of the theater, held the exposition to be so important that he often sacrificed to it the whole of his first act, introducing his characters one by one, setting forth clearly what had happened before the play, and sometimes postponing the actual beginning of the action to the end of the first act, if not to the earlier scenes of the second. Scribe seems to have believed that it did not matter much how dull the first act might be, since the spectators had paid their money and would not abandon hope until they had seen at least the second act, in which he sought always to grip their interest.

In the 'League of Youth,' the earliest of his social dramas, Ibsen follows in Scribe's footsteps; and the first act is little more than a preparatory prolog. In this play the whole story is set forth in action in the play itself; but in the following dramas, 'Pillars of Society' and 'A Doll's House' Ibsen reveals his tendency to deal with the results of deeds which took place before he begins the play itself. In other words, he suppresses his prolog, preferring to plunge at once into his action; and this forces him to modify Scribe's leisurely method. He does not mass his explanations all in the earlier scenes; he scatters them thruout the first act, and sometimes he even postpones them to the later acts. But he is careful to supply information before it is needed, adroitly letting out in the first scene what is required for the understanding of the second scene, and artfully revealing in the second scene what must be known before the third scene can be appreciated.

This method is less simple than Scribe's; it is not only more difficult, it may be dangerous; but when it is managed successfully it lends to the drama a swift directness delightful to all who relish a mastery of form. In 'Ghosts,' for example, the play which is acted before us is little more than a long fifth act, in three tense scenes; and the knowledge of what had happened in the past is ingeniously communicated to the audience at the very moment when the information is felt to be most significant. But in 'Rosmersholm,' strong as the drama is and fine as its technic is, Ibsen's method seems to be at fault in that we learn too late what it would have interested us greatly to know earlier. It is only at the end almost that we are allowed to perceive what were Rebecca West's real intentions in coming to Rosmersholm and how the influence of the house itself has transformed her. When the curtain rises she is presented to us already a changed woman; and we are at a loss to understand her motives for the evil deeds she has wrought, until we are told at last that she once was far different from what she now is. Here Ibsen loses more than he gains by abandoning the simpler method of massing his exposition in the earlier scenes of the play. Anything which confuses the spectator, which leaves him in doubt, which keeps him guessing, is contrary to Spencer's principle of "economy of attention," as important in the other arts as it is in rhetoric.

Altho he is ever seeking to awaken curiosity, to arouse the interest of expectancy, and to excite in the spectators a desire to see the thing through, Ibsen refrains from any mere mystery-mongering for its own sake. He wishes his audience to give attention not so much to the bare happenings of his story, however startling they may be in themselves, as to the effect which these happenings are certain to have on the characters. He is abundant in inventive ingenuity and in devising effective situations; and the complications of the plot of the 'Pillars of Society' would probably have hugely pleased Scribe. But he has also the larger imagination which can people situation with character and which can make situation significant as an opportunity for character to express itself. Ingenious as he is in plot-building, with him character always dominates situation. To Ibsen character is destiny, and the persons of his plays seem to have created, by their own natural proceeding, the predicaments in which they are immeshed.

Ibsen is particularly happy in the subordinate devices by which he reveals character,—for example, Maia's taking off the green shade when the Master-Builder enters the room. And another device, that of the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early 'League of Youth,' is so delicately utilized in certain of the later plays—witness, the "vine-leaves in his hair" of 'Hedda Gabler' and the "white horses" in 'Rosmersholm'—that these recurrent phrases are transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner's leading-motives. So, too, Ibsen does without the raisonneur of Dumas and Augier, that condensation of the Greek chorus into a single person, who is only the mouthpiece of the author himself and who exists chiefly to point the moral, even tho he may sometimes also adorn the tale. Ibsen so handles his story that it points its own moral; his theme is so powerfully presented in action that it speaks for itself.

It must also be noted that Ibsen, like all born playwrights, like Scribe and Dumas and Augier, like Sophocles and Shakspere and Molière, is well aware of the double aspect of the theater, in that the stage can rise to the loftiest heights of philosophic poetry and that it can fall also to the lowest depths of the show-business. An audience has ears, but the spectators who compose it have eyes also; and the born playwright never fails to provide the picturesqueness and the visible movement which satisfy the senses, whatever may be the more serious appeal to the mind. In the modern theater the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame; and it is the duty of the dramatist to satisfy our demand for a stage-setting pictorially adequate. The sets of Ibsen's plays have evidently been sharply visualized by him; they are elaborately described; and they lend themselves effectively to the art of the scene-painter. Sometimes they are beautiful in themselves, novel and suggestive; always are they characteristic of the persons and of the underlying idea of the play.