V
When Ibsen reappeared on the scenes with his Master Builder, after an interval during which he had become celebrated, the physiognomy which he presented was one that was quite unexpected. He seems to be in the same predicament as “the old fellow who did not know how to help himself.” Everything goes round in a circle, as it did in Solness’s head before he fell from the tower. And if it is possible to find any meaning at all in this very obscure piece, it is that Ibsen had a presentiment that he was going to fall down off the height of his dialectic scaffolding, but that he was not able to give up his useless habit of climbing, which, for such an old man, was a very break-neck amusement.
This presentiment has been fulfilled, for in Little Eyolf he really did fall down and break his leg. And this leg-breaking is quite in keeping with the rest of Ibsen’s dramas. It is as naturalistic as it is symbolic, and its foundation is logical.
If we to-day glance back at Ibsen’s works, we can borrow the result of his quiet meditation and say: Henrik Ibsen is himself the little Eyolf of the middle class, begotten by the union of the Gallic formula of the rights of humanity with the Teutonic deterioration of race; compare Rita and Almers. And as soon as the parents had accomplished this, they attempted no more; again compare Rita and Almers. Their only achievement was a brain that developed itself in a logical manner.
From the beginning to the end of Ibsen’s work the one thing lacking is synthesis. Synthesis is one with personality, and Ibsen is not a personality; he is all brain. He has not, in any one of his books, the warmth and pulsation that belong to a complete nature; one feels something resembling warmth, yes, something very like fever-heat, in the passages where he describes cruelty; we need only recall the martyrdom of Agnes in Brand. He was a man of brains who composed; but the brain cannot compose. The blood composes, the soul composes, the nerves compose, but of all these he had very little—there was indeed a despairing lack of them in the year 1848 and thereabout. What did that period bring with it? A wordy warfare in which the logic of Judaism assumed the highest tone. Wherever this logic found its way, it imported debates upon problems, and Ibsen became the greatest of its pupils. He agitated, he “revolutionised,” he occasioned more than one act of momentary liberation. There was one characteristic which he retained from the days when he had been an apothecary’s apprentice, and that was an affection for acids. His entire authorship comes under the head of acids. He was never a psychologist, only a constructive agent, and since Rosmersholm even his constructive power has forsaken him; his men, Wangel, Tesmann, Solness, Almers are only variations of the same Rosmer. His women, Hedda, Hilda, Rita, are obvious derivations from the woman à la Strindberg. And now that he is nearing his end, he stands where his own Rita stands, whose last hope it is to make little civilised Eyolf-cripples out of the ragged, unmannerly, yet vigorous fisher class.