MORE IBSENITY!
Dear EDITOR,—Noticing that the author of The Doll's House was to have another morning, or, to use an equally suitable epithet, mourning performance devoted to his works, I made up my mind, after bracing up my nerves, to attend it. The 23rd of February (the date of the proposed function) as the second Monday in Lent, seemed to me, too, distinctly appropriate. By attending the performance—IBSEN recommends self-execution—I sentenced myself to three hours and a half of boredom, tempered with disgust. I cannot help feeling that whatever my past may have been, the penance paid to wipe it out was excessive, and therefore rendered it unnecessary that I should attend a second performance announced for last week.
Rosmershölm is in four Acts and one Scene—a room in Rosmer's House. Act I. Rector Kroll, who is the brother-in-law of Pastor Rosmer, calls upon the latter, to ask him to edit a paper in the Conservative interest. Kroll (who, by the way, is a married man) before seeing the widower of his dead sister, has a mild flirtation with Rebecca West, a female of a certain age, who has taken up her abode for some years in the Rector's house. And here I may observe that the Rector's housekeeper, Madame Helseth, presumably a highly respectable person, although she has excellent reasons, from the first, for believing that the relations between her Master and Rebecca are scarcely platonic, accepts the domestic arrangements of the Rosmer ménage with hearty acquiescence, not to say enthusiasm. Rosmer interrupts the Rector's tête-à-tête with the fascinating Rebecca, and declines the proffered editorship, because he is a Radical, and an atheist. End of Act I.,—no action to speak of, but a good deal of wordy twaddle. In Act II. we learn that the late Mrs. Rosmer has committed suicide, because she was informed that the apostate Pastor could only save his villainy from exposure by giving immediately the position of wife to her friend Rebecca. She has had this tip on the most reliable authority,—it has been furnished by Rebecca herself. Then the Pastor asks Rebecca to marry him, but is refused, for no apparent reason, unless it be that she has tired of her guilty passion. In Act III. Rebecca admits to the widower and his brother-in-law that she has deceived the deceased, and prepares to decamp. In the final Act the apostate Pastor declares that he has been in love with Rebecca from the first, loves her now, but is not sure that she loves him. To set his mind at rest on this point, will she do him a small favour? Will she be so good as to jump into the mill-stream, and drown herself? With pleasure—and she takes a header! He explains that courtesy forbids him to keep a lady waiting, and follows her example! So both are drowned, and all ends happily!
And this is the plot! And what about the characters? Rebecca is merely a hysterical old maid, who would have been set right, in the time of the Tudors, with a sound ducking; and nowadays, had she consulted a fashionable physician, she would have been probably ordered a sea-voyage, and a diet free from stimulants. The Pastor is a feeble, fickle fool, who seemingly has had but one sensible idea in his life. He has believed his wife to be mad, and, considering that she married him, his faith in the matter rested upon evidence of an entirely convincing nature. The Rector Kroll is a prig and a bore of the first water. When he discovers Rebecca's perfidy, he suggests that she may have inherited her proneness for treachery from her father—and, to her distressed astonishment, he gives the name of a gentleman, not hitherto recognised by her as a parent! The best line in the piece, to my mind—and it certainly "went with a roar"—is a question of the housekeeper—answered in the negative—"Have you ever seen the Pastor laugh?" Laugh! with such surroundings! Pretentious twaddle, that would be repulsively immoral were it less idiotic. And so dull!
As a theatre-goer for more than a quarter of a century, I dislike undue severity, and am consequently glad to find my opinion is shared by others. "SCRUTATOR," the Dramatic Critic of Truth, wrote last week—"The few independent persons who have sat out a play by IBSEN, be it The Doll's House, or The Pillars of Society, or Rosmershölm, have said to themselves. 'Put this stuff before the playgoing public, risk it at an evening theatre, remove your claque, exhaust your attendance of the socialist and the sexless, and then see where your IBSEN will be.' I have never known an audience that cared to pay to be bored, and the over-vaunted Rosmershölm bored even the Ibsenites." I only hope it did, for they deserve their martyrdom! I believe that you personally, my dear Editor, have never seen a dramatic performance of the "Master's" work. I wish I could say as much, and I shall be surprised if you do not appreciate the feeling, after you too have partaken of this truly Lenten fare. Yours sincerely,
ONE WHO LIKES IBSEN—AT A DISTANCE.