I
Above my table hangs an old engraving after the portrait of a woman by the younger Holbein in the gallery at Windsor. It is a face of the Hedda Gabler type—Hedda Gabler three hundred years ago. Fair as a lily, dressed after the newest fashion of her day with a half aureole on her head, puffed sleeves and a high collar, everything fashionably squeezed and tight-laced, and added to this an inscrutable face with cold, veiled eyes, and a small mouth which promises nothing good. She is undoubtedly a well-bred lady of good family, who is not likely to relax her features or change her deportment, but who might possibly allow others to make advances to her. She looks so conscious of her innocence and so demurely attractive, that one thinks that she also may have had an Eckert Lövborg to initiate her theoretically into the lives of young men.
Hedda Gabler is a lady who belongs to the higher middle class, and so carefully has Ibsen analysed her that every one devoted to the study of natural phenomena and class-distinction may, with the help of some preliminary knowledge, study and probe her nature down to the secret structure of her soul. As one well versed in life and anxious to divert attention from the track which he was pursuing, Ibsen declared that this time it was only a psychological study, with no criticism of society and no wrathful pessimism. And so, dear society, good and bad, you may set yourself at rest!
But society was not at rest. This Hedda Gabler was a creature who displeased it. Nearly all women objected to her and declined to entertain such a moral monster at their tea-table, while all women-worshippers felt that through her the whole sex had been wronged, and finally the majority of men were opposed to her because they were not able to discover any traces of either manly or womanly psychology.
This was not only the case in Germany, and in England which is the home of emancipated women and the birthplace of moral zeal, but even in the author’s own Scandinavia they fought shy of her. The priests listened—they who guarded the sacred fire on the altars of the great mystery. “What is this?” they asked. “Is he beginning to speak with tongues?” And the chaste priestesses of the pure Ibsen cult maintained an ominous silence. Everywhere stillness ensued—the stillness of the storm when it rains hailstones.
Another author would have been made to suffer for it; but the great name of the great moralist held hands and tongues at bay.
Amongst us it was murmured that the wise augur had not been quite as happy on this occasion. The strings of the dramatic puppet-show were a little more visible than usual, and the two pistol shots fired in the midst of a phlegmatic bourgeois milieu put an end to all illusion. Then the different degrees of beauty in the death-scenes! Life with or without vine-leaves in the hair!—Where, in the name of wonder, do people speak like that, and where in the upper or lower world do they feel like it?
You, most honoured master, you should carry away the scaffolding and lay aside your tools as soon as the house is finished.
Yet the story is not easily disposed of! There is something hidden away which is not expressed in words, though it sometimes beats and palpitates like an injured nerve, and if anyone were to succeed in touching it, he would hold the secret in his hand. But with Ibsen we never know whether or not we are really touching the central nerve, perhaps because the nerve is not a true vibration of the soul with which the author’s entire ego is in sympathy, but only a thought palpitating in the brain which owes its origin to other causes.
The point in Hedda Gabler on which the whole piece turns is mainly this: the dissection of an ideal.
In Nora, Ibsen gives us the ideal of the modern woman; in Hedda Gabler he dissects it. All that lies between is the slow, laborious work of digging. The miner[1] climbs down into the depths where he digs and hammers in the dark. No daylight reaches him there, he does not know what he is looking for, and he does not know what he finds. Are they diamonds or coals? In the darkness of the pit the “oppressed woman” meets him, he takes hold of her and believes that he has raised a treasure and discovered the diamond. But when he begins to cut it, he thinks that it is only rock-crystal, and when he examines it more carefully, he sees that he is holding in his hand a piece of coal.
Nora is the rough diamond, The Lady from the Sea is the rock-crystal, Hedda Gabler is a piece of coal, and a bad kind of coal too.
How did Henrik Ibsen, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” as an equally celebrated fellow-countryman called him, become a misogynist à la Strindberg?
“Man created woman—out of what?” says Nietzsche. “Out of a rib of his god, the Ideal.”
It seems to me that this one little sentence contains the concentrated essence of everything that has ever been said, thought, felt and sung by man about woman.
All his vanities and all his wants, from the tenderest melodies of his soul to the most brutal demands of his senses, all his capabilities and his incapabilities, his entire cleverness and his entire stupidity, all these man has immortalised in his songs on woman.
Woman was silent. Or if she made herself heard there was not much sense in what she said. In olden times there occasionally arose a chirping sound like that of a little bird; in later times—in the times of the celebrated writers, George Sand, George Eliot, Fru Edgren-Leffler, etc.—they moralised on the subject of man. But as the sex of modern authoresses shows a certain natural disposition to attire itself in knickerbockers, one really cannot place them under the heading of “women,” they seem rather to belong to a state of transition.
The woman who is completely a woman has never betrayed herself, has never told tales out of school; and why? Because she was not so stupid. She loved and made herself loved to the best of her ability, she hated and teased, and that was an art she understood right well; while the happy or unhappy object of her attentions wrote and sang poems about her, rejoiced and suffered, wrote and sang poems....
Everything that man has written about woman is merely the description of woman such as he imagines her, it is the expression of what man expects of her, seeks for in her, asks of her, and finds or does not find in her. It is a reflection of the varying play of man’s soul throughout all ages.
Every man, every nation, every age has created its own particular type of woman.
The superficial and excitable temperament of the French during the century has produced variations of the type of contriving, vivacious little coquettes; the two great German authors, Goethe and Keller, created the thoughtless, sensuous child of nature; John Bull has so conscientiously simplified himself since the Renaissance that he is no longer able to create any type of human womanhood, his women are elves and Medusas; and as for the women in the new Scandinavian literature, with the exception of Strindberg’s hyenas and Ibsen’s “thinking women,” they can hardly be said to occupy a very prominent position.
Strindberg’s fates are ghastly vampires who suck the blood of horror-stricken man. They are not to be described in words, it would require the art of a great painter to represent them as they appear in all the unreal reality of their being.—There still remains Ibsen’s woman.
Ibsen’s woman holds her sway throughout Europe, and that is in itself a sufficient reason for us to study her as she is represented in his works, and as she stands before us in real life.