I
Henrik Ibsen was the best-hated artist of the nineteenth century. The reason is simple: He was, himself, the arch-hater of his age. Yet, granting this, the Norwegian dramatist aroused in his contemporaries a wrath that would have been remarkable even if emanating from the fiery pit of politics; in the comparatively serene field of æsthetics such overwhelming attacks from the critics of nearly every European nation testified to the singular power displayed by this poet. Richard Wagner was not so abused; the theatre of his early operations was confined to Germany, the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris a unique exception. Wagner, too, did everything that was possible to provoke antagonism. He scored his critics in speech and pamphlet. He gave back as hard names as he received. Ibsen never answered, either in print or by the mouth of friends, the outrageous allegations brought against him. Indeed, his disciples often darkened the issue by their unsolicited, uncritical championship.
In Edouard Manet, the revolutionary Parisian painter and head of the so-called impressionist movement—himself not altogether deserving the appellation—we have an analogous case to Wagner's. Ridicule, calumny, vituperation, pursued him for many years. But Paris was the principal scene of his struggles; Paris mocked him, not all Europe. Even the indignation aroused by Nietzsche was a comparatively local affair. Wagner is the only man who approaches Ibsen in the massiveness of his martyrdom. Yet Wagner had consolations for his opponents. His music-drama, so rich in colour and rhythmic beauty, his romantic themes, his appeal to the eye, his friendship with Ludwig of Bavaria, at times placated his fiercest detractors. Manet painted one or two successes for the official Salon; Nietzsche's brilliant style and faculty for coining poetic images were acclaimed, his philosophy declared detestable. Yes, fine phrases may make fine psychologues. Robert Browning never felt the heavy hand of public opinion as did Ibsen. We must go back to the days of Byron and Shelley for an example of such uncontrollable and unanimous condemnation. But, again, Ibsen tops them all as victim of storms that blew from every quarter: Norway to Austria, England to Italy, Russia to America. There were no mitigating circumstances in his lèse-majesté against popular taste. No musical rhyme, scenic splendour, or rhythmic prose, acted as an emotional buffer between him and his audiences. His social dramas were condemned as the sordid, heartless productions of a mediocre poet, who wittingly debased our moral currency. And as they did not offer as bribes the amatory intrigue, the witty dialogue, the sensual arabesques of the French stage, or the stilted rhetoric and heroic postures of the German, they were assailed from every critical watch-tower in Europe. Ibsen was a stranger, Ibsen was disdainfully silent, therefore Ibsen must be annihilated. Possibly if he had, like Wagner, explained his dramas, we should have had confusion thrice confounded.
The day after his death the entire civilised world wrote of him as the great man he was: great man, great artist, great moralist. And A Doll's House only saw the light in 1879—so potent a creator of critical perspective is Death. There were, naturally, many dissonant opinions in this symphony of praise. Yet how different it all read from the opinions of a decade ago. Adverse criticism, especially in America, was vitiated by the fact that Ibsen the dramatist was hardly known here. Ibsen was eagerly read, but seldom played; and rarely played as he should be. He is first the dramatist. His are not closet dramas to be leisurely digested by lamp-light; conceived for the theatre, actuality their key-note, his characters are pale abstractions on the printed page—not to mention the inevitable distortions to be found in the closest translation. We are all eager to tell what we think of him. But do we know him? Do we know him as do the goers of Berlin, or St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Vienna, or Munich? And do we realise his technical prowess? In almost every city of Europe Ibsen is in the regular repertory. He is given at intervals with Shakespeare, Schiller, Dumas, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Grillparzer, Hervieu, Sudermann, and with the younger dramatists. That is the true test. Not the isolated divinity of a handful of worshippers, with an esoteric message, his plays are interpreted by skilled actors and not for the untrained if enthusiastic amateur. There is no longer Ibsenism on the Continent; Ibsen is recognised as the greatest dramatist since Racine and Molière. Cults claim him no more, and therefore the critical point of view at the time of his death had entirely shifted. His works are played in every European language and have been translated into the Japanese.
The mixed blood in the veins of Ibsen may account for his temperament; he was more Danish than Norwegian, and there were German and Scotch strains in his ancestry. Such obscure forces of heredity doubtless played a rôle in his career. Norwegian in his love of freedom, Danish in his artistic bent, his philosophic cast of mind was wholly Teutonic. Add to these a possible theologic prepossession derived from the Scotch, a dramatic technique in which Scribe and Sophocles are not absent, and we have to deal with a disquieting problem. Ibsen was a mystery to his friends and foes. Hence the avidity with which he is claimed by idealists, realists, socialists, anarchists, symbolists, by evangelical folk, and by agnostics. There were in him many contradictory elements. Denounced as a pessimist, all his great plays have, notwithstanding, an unmistakable message of hope, from Brand to When We Dead Awake. An idealist he is, but one who has realised the futility of dreams; like all world-satirists, he castigates to purify. His realism is largely a matter of surfaces, and if we care to look we may find the symbol lodged in the most prosaic of his pieces. His anarchy consists in a firm adherence to the doctrine of individualism; Emerson and Thoreau are of his spiritual kin. In both there is the contempt for mob-rule, mob-opinion; for both the minority is the true rational unit; and with both there is a certain aloofness from mankind. Yet we do not denounce Emerson or Thoreau as enemies of the people. To be candid, Ibsen's belief in the rights of the individual is rather naïve and antiquated, belonging as it does to the tempestuous period of '48. Max Stirner was far in advance of the playwright in his political and menacing egoism; while Nietzsche, who loathed democracy, makes Ibsen's aristocracy timid by comparison.
Ibsen can hardly be called a philosophic anarch, for the body of doctrine, either political or moral, deducible from his plays is so perplexing by reason of its continual affirmation and negation, so blurred by the kaleidoscopic clash of character, that one can only fuse these mutually exclusive qualities by realising him as a dramatist who has created a microcosmic world; in a word, we must look upon the man as a creator of dramatic character not as a theorist. And his characters have all the logical illogicality of life.
Several traits emerge from this welter of cross-purposes and action. Individualism is a leading motive from the first to the last play; a strong sense of moral responsibility—an oppressive sense, one is tempted to add—is blended with a curious flavour of Calvinism, in which are traces of predestination. A more singular equipment for a modern dramatist is barely conceivable. Soon we discover that Ibsen is playing with the antique dramatic counters under another name. Free-will and determinism—what are these but the very breath of classic tragedy! In one of his rare moments of expansion he said: "Many things and much upon which my later work has turned—the contradiction between endowment and desire, between capacity and will, at once the entire tragedy and comedy of mankind—may here be dimly discerned." Moral responsibility evaded is a favourite theme of his. No Furies of the Greek drama pursued their victims with such relentless vengeance as pursues the unhappy wretches of Ibsen. In Ghosts, the old scriptural wisdom concerning the sins of parents is vividly expounded, though the heredity doctrine is sadly overworked. As in other plays of his, there were false meanings read into the interpretation; the realism of Ghosts is negligible; the symbol looms large in every scene. Search Ibsen throughout and it will be found that his subject-matter is fundamentally the same as that of all great masters of tragedy. It is his novel manner of presentation, his transposition of themes hitherto treated epically, to the narrow, unheroic scale of middle-class family life that blinded critics to his true significance. This tuning down of the heroic, this reversal of the old æsthetic order extorted bitter remonstrances. If we kill the ideal in art and life, what have we left? was the cry. But Ibsen attacks false as well as true ideals and does not always desert us after stripping us of our self-respect. A poet of doubt he is, who seldom attempts a solution; but he is also a puritan—a positivist puritan—and his scourgings are an equivalent for that katharsis, in the absence of which Aristotle denied the title of tragedy.
Consider, then, how Ibsen was misunderstood. Setting aside the historical and poetic works, we are confronted in the social plays by the average man and woman of every-day life. They live, as a rule, in mediocre circumstances; they are harried by the necessities of quotidian existence. Has this undistinguished bourgeoisie the potentialities of romance, of tragedy, of beauty? Wait, says Ibsen, and you will see your own soul, the souls of the man and woman who jostle you in the street, the same soul in palace or hovel, that orchestra of cerebral sensations, the human soul. And it is the truth he speaks. We follow with growing uneasiness his exposition of a soul. The spectacle is not pleasing. In his own magical but charmless way the souls of his people are turned inside out during an evening. No monologues, no long speeches, no familiar machinery of the drama, are employed. But the miracle is there. You face yourself. Is it any wonder that public and critic alike waged war against this showman of souls, this new psychologist of the unflattering, this past master of disillusionment? For centuries poets, tragic and comic, satiric and lyric, have been exalting, teasing, mocking, and lulling mankind. When Aristophanes flayed his victims he sang a merry tune; Shakespeare, with Olympian amiability, portrayed saint and sinner alike to the accompaniment of a divine music. But Ibsen does not cajole, amuse, or bribe with either just or specious illusions. He is determined to tell the truth of our microcosmic baseness. The truth is his shibboleth. And when enounced its sound is not unlike the chanting of a Nox Irae. He lifted the ugly to heroic heights; the ignoble he analysed with the cold ardour of a moral biologist—the ignoble, that "sublime of the lower slopes," as Flaubert has it.
This psychological method was another rock of offence. Why transform the playhouse into a school of metaphysics? But Ibsen is not a metaphysician and his characters are never abstractions; instead, they are very lively humans. They offend those who believe the theatre to be a place of sentimentality or clowning; these same Ibsen men and women offend the lovers of Shakespeare and the classics. We know they are real, yet we dislike them as we dislike animals trained to imitate humanity too closely. The simian gestures cause a feeling of repulsion in both cases; surely we are not of such stock! And we move away. So do we sometimes turn from the Ibsen stage when human souls are made to go through a series of sorrowful evolutions by their stern trainer. To what purpose such revelations? Is it art? Is not our ideal of a nobler humanity shaken?
Ibsen's report of the human soul as he sees it is his right, the immemorial right of priest, prophet, or artist. All our life is a huge lie if this right be denied; from the Preacher to Schopenhauer, from Æschylus to Molière, the man who reveals, in parable or as in a mirror, the soul of his fellow-being is a man who is a benefactor of his kind, if he be not a cynical spirit that denies. Ibsen is a satirist of a superior degree; he has the gift of creating a Weltspiegel in which we see the shape of our souls. He is never the cynic, though he has portrayed the cynic in his plays. He has too much moral earnestness to view the world merely as a vile jest. That he is an artist is acknowledged. And for the ideals dear to us which he so savagely attacks, he so clears the air about some old familiar, mist-haunted ideal of duty, that we wonder if we have hitherto mistaken its meaning.
From being denounced as a corrupter of youth, an anarch of letters, a debaser of current moral coin, we have learned to view him as a force making for righteousness, as a master of his craft, and as a creator of a large gallery of remarkably vivid human characters. We know now that many modern dramatists have carried their pails to this vast northern lake and from its pine-hemmed and sombre waters have secretly drawn sparkling inspiration.
The truth is that Ibsen can be no longer denied—we exclude the wilfully blind—by critic or public. He is too big a man to be locked up in a library as if he were full of vague forbidden wickedness. When competently interpreted he is never offensive; the scenes to which the critics refer as smacking of sex are mildness itself compared to the doings of Sardou's lascivious marionettes. In the theatrical sense his are not sex plays, as are those of Dumas the younger. He discusses woman as a social as well as a psychical problem. Any picture of love is tolerated so it be frankly sentimental; but let Ibsen mention the word sex and there is a call to arms by the moral policemen of the drama. Thus, by some critical hocus-pocus the world was led for years to believe that this lofty thinker, moralist, and satirist concealed an immoral teacher. It is an old trick of the enemy to place upon an author's shoulders the doings and sayings of his mimic people. Ibsen was fathered with all the sins of his characters. Instead of being studied from life, they were, so many averred, the result of a morbid brain, the brain of a pessimist and a hater of his kind.
We have seen that Ibsen offended by his disregard of academic dramatic attitudes. His personages are ordinary, yet like Browning's meanest soul they have a human side to show us. The inherent stuff of his plays is tragic; but the hero and heroine do not stamp, stalk, or spout blank verse; it is the tragedy of life without the sop of sentiment usually administered by second-rate poets. Missing the colour and decoration, the pretty music, and the eternal simper of the sensual, we naturally turn our back on such a writer. If he knows souls, he certainly does not understand the box-office. This for the negative side. On the positive, the apparent baldness of the narrative, the ugliness of his men and women, their utterance of ideas foreign to cramped, convention-ridden lives, mortify us immeasurably. The tale always ends badly or sadly. And when one of his characters begins to talk about the "joy of life," it is the gloom of life that is evoked. The women—and here is the shock to our masculine vanity—the women assert themselves too much, telling men that they are not what they believe themselves to be. Lastly, the form of the Ibsen play is compact with ideas and emotion. We usually don't go to the theatre to think or to feel. With Ibsen we must think, and think closely; we must feel—worse still, be thrilled to our marrow by the spectacle of our own spiritual skeletons. No marvellous music is there to heal the wounded nerves as in Tristan and Isolde; no prophylactic for the merciless acid of the dissector. We either breathe a rarefied atmosphere in his Brand and in When We Dead Awake, or else, in the social drama, the air is so dense with the intensity of the closely wrought moods that we gasp as if in the chamber of a diving-bell. Human, all too human!
Protean in his mental and spiritual activities, a hater of shams—religious, political, and social shams—more symbolist than realist, in assent with Goethe that no material is unfit for poetic treatment, the substance of Ibsen's morality consists in his declaration that men to be free must first free themselves. Once, in addressing a group of Norwegian workmen, he told them that man must ennoble himself, he must will himself free; "to will is to have to will," as he says in Emperor and Galilean. Yet in Peer Gynt he declares "to be oneself is to slay oneself." Surely all this is not very radical. He wrote to Georg Brandes, that the State was the foe of the individual; therefore the State must go. But the revolution must be one of the spirit. Ibsen ever despised socialism, and after his mortification over the fiasco of the Paris Commune he had never a good word for that vain legend: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Brandes relates that while Ibsen wished—in one of his poems—to place a torpedo under the social ark, there was also a time when he longed to use the knout on the willing slaves of a despised social system.
Perhaps the main cause of Ibsen's offending is his irony. The world forgives much, irony never, for irony is the ivory tower of the intellectual, the last refuge of the original. It is not the intellectual irony of Meredith, nor the playful irony of Anatole France, but a veiled corrosive irony that causes you to tread suspiciously every yard of his dramatic domain. The "second intention," the secondary dialogue, spoken of by Maeterlinck, in the Ibsen plays is very disconcerting to those who prefer their drama free from enigma. Otherwise his dialogue is a model for future dramatists. It is clarity itself and, closely woven, it has the characteristic accents of nature. Read, we feel its gripping logic; spoken by an actor, it tingles with vitality.
For the student there is a fascination in the cohesiveness of these dramas. Ibsen's mind was like a lens; it focussed the refracted, scattered, and broken lights of opinions and theories of his day upon the contracted space of his stage. In a fluid state the ideas that crystallised in his prose series are to be found in his earliest work; there is a remorseless fastening of link to link in the march-like movement of his plays. Their author seems to delight in battering down in Ghosts what he had preached in A Doll's House; The Enemy of the People exalted the individual man, though Ghosts taught that a certain kind of personal liberty is deadly; The Wild Duck, which follows, is another puzzle, for in it the misguided idealist is pilloried for destroying homes by his truth-telling, dangerous tongue; Rosmersholm follows with its portrayal of lonely souls; and the danger of filling old bottles with the fermenting wines of new ideas is set forth; in The Lady from the Sea free-will, the will to love, is lauded, though Rebekka West and Rosmersholm perished because of their exercise of this same will; Hedda Gabler shows the converse of Ellida Wangel's "will to power." Hedda is a creature wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns us again, for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead your own life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it leads to a catastrophe which wrecks a household. This game of contradiction is continued in The Master-Builder, a most potent exposition of human motives. Solness is sick-brained because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, the "younger generation," a Hedda Gabler à rebours, that he so feared would come knocking at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, arouses his slumbering self; curiously enough, if the ordinary standards of success be adduced, he goes to his destruction when he again climbs the dizzy spire. In John Gabriel Borkman the allegory is clearer. Sacrificing love to a base ambition, to "commercialism," Borkman at the close of his great and miserable life discovers that he has committed the one unpardonable offence: he has slain the love-life in the woman he loved, and for the sake of gold. So he is a failure, and, like Peer Gynt, he is ready for the Button-Moulder with his refuse-heap, who lies in wait for all cowardly and incomplete souls. The Epilogue returns to the mountains, the Ibsen symbol of freedom, and there we learn for the last time that love is greater than art, that love is life. And the dead of life awake.
The immorality of these plays is so well concealed that only abnormal moralists detect it. It may be admitted that Ibsen, like Shakespeare, manifests a preference for the man who fails. What is new is the art with which this idea is developed. The Ibsen play begins where other plays end. The form is the "amplified catastrophe" of Sophocles. After marriage the curtain is rung up on the true drama of life, therefore marriage is a theme which constantly preoccupies this modern poet. He regards it from all sides, asking whether "by self-surrender, self-realisation may be achieved." His speech delivered once before a ladies' club at Christiania proves that he is not a champion of latter-day woman's rights. "The women will solve the question of mankind, but they must do so as mothers." Yet Nora Helmer, when she slammed the door of her doll's home, caused an echo in the heart of every intelligent woman in Christendom. It is not necessary now to ask whether a woman would, or should, desert her children; Nora's departure was only the symbol of her liberty, the gesture of a newly awakened individuality. Ibsen did not preach—as innocent persons of both sexes and all anti-Ibsenites believe—that woman should throw overboard her duties; this is an absurd construction. As well argue that the example of Othello must set jealous husbands smothering their wives. A Doll's House enacted has caused no more evil than Othello. It was the plea for woman as a human being, neither more nor less than man, which the dramatist made. Our withers must have been well wrung, for it aroused a whirlwind of wrath, and henceforth the house-key became the symbol of feminine supremacy. Yet in his lovely drama of pity and resignation, Little Eyolf, the tenderest from his pen, the poet set up a counter-figure to Nora, demonstrating the duties parents owe their children.
Without exaggeration, he may be said to have discovered for the stage the modern woman. No longer the sleek cat of the drawing-room, or the bayadere of luxury, or the wild outlaw of society, the "emancipated" Ibsen woman is the sensible woman, the womanly woman, bearing a not remote resemblance to the old-fashioned woman, who calmly accepts her share of the burdens and responsibilities of life, single or wedded, though she insists on her rights as a human being, and without a touch of the heroic or the supra-sentimental. Ibsen should not be held responsible for the caricatures of womanhood evolved by his disciples. When a woman evades her responsibilities, when she is frivolous or evil, an exponent of the "life-lie" in matrimony, then Ibsen grimly paints her portrait, and we denounce him as cynical for telling the truth. And truth is seldom a welcome guest. But he knows that a fiddle can be mended and a bell not; and in placing his surgeon-like finger on the sorest spot of our social life, he sounds this bell, and when it rings cracked he coldly announces the fact. But his attitude toward marriage is not without its mystery. In Love's Comedy his hero and heroine part, fearing the inevitable shipwreck in the union of two poetic hearts without the necessary means of a prosaic subsistence. In the later plays, marriage for gain, for home, for anything but love, brings upon its victims the severest consequences; John Gabriel Borkman, Hedda, Dora, Mrs. Alving, Allmers, Rubek, are examples. The idea of man's cruelty to man or woman, or woman's cruelty to woman or man, lashes him into a fury. Then he becomes Ibsen the Berserker.
Therefore let us beware the pitfalls dug by some Ibsen exegetists; the genius of the dramatist is too vast and versatile to be pinned down to a single formula. If you believe that he is dangerous to young people, let it be admitted—but so are Thackeray, Balzac, and Hugo. So is any strong thinker. Ibsen is a powerful dissolvent for an imagination clogged by theories of life, low ideals, and the facile materialism that exalts the letter but slays the spirit. He is a foe to compromise, a hater of the half-way, the roundabout, the weak-willed, above all, a hater of the truckling politician—he is a very Torquemada to politicians. At the best there is ethical grandeur in his conceptions, and if the moral stress is unduly felt, if he tears asunder the veil of our beloved illusions and shows us as we are, it is because of his righteous indignation against the platitudinous hypocrisy of modern life. His unvarying code is: "So to conduct one's life as to realise oneself." Withal an artist, not the evangelist of a new gospel, not the social reformer, not the exponent of science in the drama. These titles have been thrust upon him by his overheated admirers. He never posed as a prophet. He is poet, psychologist, skald, dramatist, not always a soothsayer. The artist in him preserved him from the fate of the didactic Tolstoy. With the Russian he shares the faculty of emptying souls. Ibsen, who vaguely recalls Stendhal in his clear-eyed vision and dry irony, is without a trace of the Frenchman's cynicism or dilettantism. Like all dramatists of the first rank, the Norwegian has in him much of the seer, yet he always avoided the pontifical tone; he may be a sphinx, but he never plays the oracle. His categorical imperative, however, "All or nothing," does not bear the strain of experience. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at such an intolerable tension. The very illusions he seeks to destroy would be supplanted by others. Man exists because of his illusions. Without the "life-lie" he would perish in the mire. His illusions are his heritage from aeons of ancestors. The classic view considered man as the centre of the universe; that position has been ruthlessly altered by science—we are now only tiny points of consciousness in unthinkable space. Isolated then, true children of our inconsiderable planet, we have in us traces of our predecessors. True, one may be disheartened by the pictures of unheroic meanness and petty corruption, the ill-disguised instincts of ape and tiger, in the prose plays, even to the extent of calling them—as did M. Melchior de Vogüé, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet—a grotesque Iliad of Nihilism. But we need not despair. If Ibsen seemed to say for a period, "Evil, be thou my good," his final words in the Epilogue are those of pity and peace: Pax vobiscum!
II
This old man with the head and hair of an electrified Schopenhauer and the torso of a giant, his temperament coinciding with his curt, imperious name, left behind him twenty-six plays, one or more in manuscript. A volume of very subjective poems concludes this long list; among the dramas are at least three of heroic proportion and length. Ibsen was born at Skien, Norway, 1828. His forebears were Danish, German, Scotch, and Norwegian. His father, a man of means, failed in business, and at the age of eight the little Henrik had to face poverty. His schooling was of the slightest. He was not much of a classical scholar and soon he was apprenticed to an apothecary at Grimstad, the very name of which evokes a vision of gloominess. He did not prove a success as a druggist, as he spent his spare time reading and caricaturing his neighbours. His verse-making was desultory, his accustomed mien an unhappy combination of Hamlet and Byron; his misanthropy at this period recalls that of the young Schopenhauer. His favourite reading was poetry and history, and he had a predilection for sketching and conjuring tricks. It might be pointed out that here in the raw were the aptitudes of a future dramatist: poetry, pictures, illusion. In the year 1850 Ibsen published his first drama, derived from poring over Sallust and Cicero. It was a creditable effort of youth, and to the discerning it promised well for his literary future. He was gifted, without doubt, and from the first he sounded the tocsin of revolt. Pessimistic and rebellious his poems were; he had tasted misery, his home was an unhappy one—there was little love in it for him—and his earliest memories were clustered about the town jail, the hospital, and the lunatic asylum. These images were no doubt the cause of his bitter and desperate frame of mind; grinding poverty, the poverty of a third-rate provincial town in Norway, was the climax of his misery. And then, too, the scenery, rugged and noble, and the climate, depressing for months, all had their effect upon his sensitive imagination. From the start, certain conceptions of woman took root in his mind and reappear in nearly all his dramas. Catalina's wife, Aurelia, and the vestal Furia, who are reincarnated in the Dagny and Hjordis of his Vikings, reappear in A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and at the last in When We Dead Awake. One is the eternal womanly, the others the destructive feminine principle, woman the conqueror. As Catalina is a rebel against circumstances, so are Maja and the sculptor in the Epilogue of 1899. There is almost a half century of uninterrupted composition during which this group of men and women disport themselves. Brand, a poetic rather than an acting drama, is no exception; Brand and the Sheriff, Agnes and Gerda. These types are cunningly varied, their traits so concealed as to be recognised only after careful study. But the characteristics of each are alike. The monotony of this procedure is redeemed by the unity of conception—Ibsen is the reflective poet, the poet who conceives the idea and then clothes it, therein differing from Shakespeare and Goethe, to whom form and idea are simultaneously born.
In March, 1850, he went to Christiania and entered Heltberg's school as a preparation for the university. His studies were brief. He became involved in a boyish revolutionary outburst—in company with his life-long friend, the good-hearted Björnstjerne Björnson, who helped him many times—and while nothing serious occurred, it caused the young man to effervesce with literary plans and the new ideas of his times. The Warrior's Tomb, his second play, was accepted and actually performed at the Christiania theatre. The author gave up his university dreams and began to earn a rude living by his pen. He embarked in newspaper enterprises which failed. An extremist politically, he soon made a crop of enemies, the wisest crop a strong character can raise; but he often worked on an empty stomach in consequence. The metal of the man showed from the first: endure defeat, but no compromise! He went to Bergen in 1851 and was appointed theatre poet at a small salary; this comprised a travelling stipend. Ibsen saw the Copenhagen and Dresden theatres with excellent results. His eyes were opened to the possibilities of his craft, and on his return he proved a zealous stage manager. He composed, in 1853, St. John's Night, which was played at his theatre, and in 1857 Fru Inger of Oesträtt was written. It is old-fashioned in form, but singularly lifelike in characterization and fruitful in situations. The story is semi-historical. In the Lady Inger we see a foreshadowing of his strong, vengeful women. Olaf Liljekrans need not detain us. The Vikings (1858) is a sterling specimen of drama, in which legend and history are artfully blended. The Feast of Solhaug (1857) was very successful in its treatment of the saga, and is comparatively cheerful.
Ibsen left Bergen to take the position of director at the Norwegian Theatre, Christiania. He remained there until 1862, staging all manner of plays, from Shakespeare to Scribe. The value of these years was incalculable in his technical development. A poet born and by self-discipline developed, he was now master of a difficult art, an art that later he never lost, even when, weary of the conventional comedy of manners, he sought to spiritualize the form and give us the psychology of commonplace souls. It may be noted that, despite the violinist Ole Bull's generous support, the new theatre endured only five years. More than passing stress should be laid upon this formative period. His experience of these silent years was bitter, but rich in spiritual recompense. After some difficulty in securing a paltry pension from his government, Ibsen was enabled to leave Norway, which had become a charnel-house to him since the Danish war with Germany, and with his young wife he went to Rome. Thenceforth his was a gypsy career. He lived in Rome, in Dresden, in Munich, and again in Rome. He spent his summers in the Austrian Tyrol, at Sorrento, and occasionally in his own land. His was a self-imposed exile, and he did not return to Christiania to reside permanently until an old, but famous man. Silent, unsociable, a man of harsh moods, he was to those who knew him an upright character, an ideal husband and father. His married life had no history, a sure sign of happiness, for he was well mated. Yet one feels that, despite his wealth, his renown, existence was for him a via dolorosa. Ever the solitary dreamer, he wrote a play about every two or three years, and from the very beginning of his exile the effect in Norway was like unto the explosion of a bomb-shell. Not wasting time in answering his critics, it was nevertheless remarked that each new piece was a veiled reply to slanderous criticism. Ghosts was absolutely intended as an answer to the attacks upon A Doll's House; here is what Nora would have become if she had been a dutiful wife, declares Ibsen, in effect; and we see Mrs. Alving in her motherly agonies. The counterblast to the criticism of Ghosts was An Enemy of the People; Dr. Stockman is easily detected as a partial portrait of Ibsen.
Georg Brandes, to whom the poet owes many ideas as well as sound criticism, said that early in his life a lyric Pegasus had been killed under Ibsen This striking hint of his sacrifice is supplemented by a letter in which he compared the education of a poet to that of a dancing bear. The bear is tied in a brewer's vat and a slow fire is built under the vat; the wretched animal is then forced to dance. Life forces the poet to dance by means quite as painful; he dances and the tears roll down his cheeks all the while. Ibsen forsook poetry for prose and—the dividing line never to be recrossed is clearly indicated between Emperor and Galilean and The Pillars of Society—he bestowed upon his country three specimens of his poetic genius. As Italy fructified the genius of Goethe, so it touched as with a glowing coal the lips of the young Northman. Brand, a noble epic, startled and horrified Norway. In Rome Ibsen regained his equilibrium. He saw his country and countrymen more sanely, more steadily, though there is a terrible fund of bitterness in this dramatic poem. The local politics of Christiania no longer irritated him, and in the hot, beautiful South he dreamed of the North, of his beloved fiords and mountains, of ice and avalanche, of troll and saga. Luckily for those who have not mastered Norwegian, C. H. Herford's translation of Brand exists, and, while the translator deplores his sins of omission, it is a work—as are the English versions of the prose plays by William Archer—that gives one an excellent idea of the original. In Brand (1866) Ibsen is at his furthest extremity from compromise. This clergyman sacrifices his mother, his wife, his child, his own life, to a frosty ideal: "All or nothing." He is implacable in his ire against worldliness, in his contempt of churchmen that believe in half-way measures. He perishes on the heights as a voice proclaims, "He is the God of Love." Greatly imaginative, charged with spiritual spleen and wisdom, Brand at once placed Ibsen among the mighty.
He followed it with a new Odyssey of his soul, the amazing Peer Gynt (1867), in which his humour, hitherto a latent quality, his fantasy, bold invention, and the poetic evocation of the faithful, exquisite Solveig, are further testimony to his breadth of resource. Peer Gynt is all that Brand was not: whimsical, worldly, fantastic, weak-willed, not so vicious as perverse; he is very selfish, one who was to himself sufficient, therefore a failure. The will, if it frees, may also kill. It killed the soul of Peer. There are pages of unflagging humour, poetry, and observation; scene dissolves into scene; Peer travels over half the earth, is rich, is successful, is poor; and at the end meets the Button-Moulder, that ironical shadow who tells him what he has become. We hear the Boyg, the spirit of compromise, with its huge, deadly, coiling lengths, gruffly bid Peer to "go around." Facts of life are to be slunk about, never to be faced. Peer comes to harbour in the arms of his deserted Solveig. The resounding sarcasm, the ferociousness of the attack on all the idols of the national cavern, raised a storm in Norway that did not abate for years. Ibsen was again a target for the bolts of critical and public hatred. Peer Gynt is the Scandinavian Faust.
Having purged his soul of this perilous stuff, the poet, in 1873, finished his double drama Emperor and Galilean, not a success dramatically, but a strong, interesting work for the library, though it saw the footlights at Berlin, Leipsic, and Christiania. The apostate Emperor Julian is the protagonist. We discern Ibsen the mystic philosopher longing for his Third Kingdom.
After a silence of four years The Pillars of Society appeared. Like its predecessor in the same genre, The Young Men's League, it is a prose drama, a study of manners, and a scathing arraignment of civic dishonesty. All the rancour of its author against the bourgeois hypocrisy of his countrymen comes to the surface; as in The Young Men's League the vacillating nature of the shallow politician is laid bare. It seems a trifle banal now, though the canvas is large, the figures animated. One recalls Augier without his Gallic esprit, rather than the later Ibsen. A Doll's House was once a household word, as was Ghosts (1881). There is no need now to retell the story of either play. Ghosts, in particular, has an antique quality, the dénouement leaves us shivering. It may be set down as the strongest play of the nineteenth century, and also the most harrowing. Its intensity borders on the hallucinatory. We involuntarily recall the last act of Tristan and Isolde or the final movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic symphony. It is the shrill discord between the mediocre creatures involved and the ghastly punishment meted out to the innocent that agitates and depresses us. Here are human souls illuminated as if by a lightning flash; we long for the anticipated thunder. It does not sound. The drama ends in silence—one of those pauses (Ibsen employs the pause as does a musical composer) which leaves the spectator unstrung. The helpless sense of hovering about the edge of a bottomless gulf is engendered by this play. No man could have written it but Ibsen, and we hope that no man will ever attempt a parallel performance, for such art modulates across the borderland of the pathologic.
The Wild Duck (1884) followed An Enemy of the People (1882). It is the most puzzling of the prose dramas except The Master-Builder, for in it Ibsen deliberately mocks himself and his ideals. It is, nevertheless, a profoundly human and moving work. Gina Ekdal, the wholesome, sensible wife of Ekdal, the charlatan photographer—a revenant of Peer Gynt—has been called a feminine Sancho Panza. Gregers Werle, the meddlesome truth-teller; Relling—a sardonic incarnation of the author—who believes in feeding humanity on the "life-lie" to maintain its courage; the tiny Hedwig, sweetest and freshest of Ibsen's girls—these form a memorable ensemble. And how the piece plays! Humour and pathos alternate, while the symbol is not so remote that an average audience need miss its meaning. The end is cruel. Ibsen is often cruel, with the passionless indifference of the serene Buddha. But he is ever logical. Nora must leave her husband's house—a "happy ending" would be ridiculous—and Hedwig must be sacrificed instead of the wild duck, or her fool of a father. There is a battalion of minor characters in the Ibsen plays who recall Dickens by their grotesque, sympathetic physiognomies. To deny this dramatist humour is to miss a third of his qualities. His is not the ventripotent humour of Rabelais or Cervantes; it seldom leaves us without the feeling that the poet is slyly laughing at us, not with us, though in the early comedies there are many broad and telling strokes.
Rosmersholm (1886) is a study of two temperaments. Rebekka West is another malevolent portrait in his gallery of dangerous and antipathetic women. She ruins Rosmersholm, ruins herself, because she does not discover this true self until too late. The play illustrates the extraordinary technique of the master. It seems to have been written backward; until the third act we are not aware that the peaceful home of the Rosmersholms is the battle-field of a malignant soul. The Lady from the Sea (1888) illustrates the thesis that love must be free. The allegory is rather strained and in performance the play lacks poetic glamour. Hedda Gabler (1890) is a masterpiece. A more selfish, vicious, cold nature than Hedda's never stepped from the page of a Russian novel—Becky Sharp and Madame Marneffe are lovable persons in comparison. She is not in the slightest degree like the stage "adventuress," but is a magnificent example of egoism magnificently delineated and is the true sister in fiction of Julien Sorel. That she is dramatically worth the while is beside the question. Her ending by a pistol shot is justice itself; alive she fascinates as does some exotic reptile. She is representative of her species, the loveless woman, the petty hater, a Lady Macbeth reversed. Ibsen has studied her with the same care and curiosity he bestowed upon the homely Gina Ekdal.
His Master-Builder (1892) is the beginning of the last cycle. A true interior drama, we enter here into the region of the symbolical. With Ibsen the symbol is always an image, never an abstraction, a state of sensibility, not a formula, and the student may winnow many examples from The Pretenders (1864), with its "kingship" idea, to the Epilogue. Solness stands on the heights only to perish, but in the full possession of his soul. Hilda Wangel is one of the most perplexing characters to realise in the modern theatre. She, with her cruelty and loveliness of perfect youth, is the work of a sorcerer who holds us spellbound while the souls he has created by his black art slowly betray themselves. It may be said that all this is not the art of the normal theatre. Very true. It more nearly resembles a dramatic confessional with a hidden auditory bewitched into listening to secrets never suspected of the humanity that hedges us about in street or home. Ibsen is clairvoyant. He takes the most familiar material and holds it in the light of his imagination; straightway we see a new world, a northern dance of death, like the ferocious pictures of his fellow-countryman, the painter Edvard Munch.
Little Eyolf (1894) is fairly plain reading, with some fine overtones of suffering and self-abnegation. Its lesson is wholly satisfying. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), written at an age when most poets show declining power, is another monument to the vigour and genius of Ibsen. The story winds about the shattered career of a financier. There is a secondary plot, in which the parental curses come home to roost—the son, carefully reared to wipe away the stain from his father's name, prefers Paris and a rollicking life. The desolation under this roof-tree is almost epical: two sisters in deadly antagonism, a blasted man, the old wolf, whose footfalls in the chamber above become absolutely sinister as the play progresses, are made to face the hard logic of their misspent lives. The doctrine of compensation has never had such an exponent as Ibsen.
In the last of his published plays, When We Dead Awake (1899), we find earlier and familiar themes developed at moments with contrapuntal mastery. Rubek, the sculptor, has aroused a love that he never dared to face. He married the wrong woman. His early dream, the inspiration of his master work, he has lost. His art withers. And when he meets his Irene, her mind is full of wandering ghosts. To the heights, to the same peaks that Brand climbed, they both must mount, and there they are destroyed, as was Brand, by an avalanche. Eros is the triumphant god of the aged magician.
III
It must be apparent to those who have not read or seen the Ibsen plays that, despite this huddled and foreshortened account, they are in essence quite different from what has been reported of them. Idealistic, symbolistic, moral, and ennobling, the Ibsen drama was so vilified by malice and ignorance that its very name was a portent of evil. Mad or wicked Ibsen is not. His scheme of life and morals is often oblique and paradoxical, his interpretation of truths so elliptical that we are confused. But he is essentially sound. He believes in the moral continuity of the universe. His astounding energy is a moral energy. Salvation by good works is his burden. The chief thing is to be strong in your faith. He despises the weak, not the strong sinner. His Supermen are the bankrupts of romantic heroism. His strong man is frequently wrong-headed; but the weakling works the real mischief. Never admit you are beaten. Begin at the bottom twenty times, and when the top is achieved die, or else look for loftier peaks to climb. Ibsen exalts strength. His "ice-church" is chilly; the lungs drink in with difficulty the buffeting breezes on his heights; yet how bracing, how inspiring, is this austere place of worship. Bad as is mankind, Ibsen, who was ever in advance of his contemporaries, believed in its possibility for betterment. Here the optimist speaks. Brand's spiritual pride is his downfall; nevertheless, Ibsen, an aristocratic thinker, believes that of pride one cannot have too much. He recognised the selfish and hollow foundation of all "humanitarian" movements. He is a sign-post for the twentieth century when the aristocratic of spirit must enter into combat with the herd instinct of a depressing socialism. His influence has been tremendous. His plays teem with the general ideas of his century. His chief value lies in the beauty of his art; his is the rare case of the master-singer rounding a long life with his master works. He brought to the theatre new ideas; he changed forever the dramatic map of Europe; he originated a new method of surprising life, capturing it and forcing it to give up a moiety of its mystery for the uses of a difficult and recondite art. He fashioned character anew. And he pushed resolutely into the mist that surrounded the human soul, his Diogenes lantern glimmering, his brave, lonely heart undaunted by the silence and the solitude. His message? Who shall say? He asks questions, and, patterning after nature, he seldom answers them. When his ideas sicken and die—he asserted that the greatest truth outlives its usefulness in time, and it may not be denied that his drama is a dissolvent; already the early plays are in historical twilight and the woman question of his day is for us something quite different—his art will endure. Henrik Ibsen was a man of heroic fortitude. His plays are a bold and stimulating spectacle for the spirit. Should we ask more of a dramatic poet?