To Ibsen, according to Shaw, the pioneer of civilization is the man or woman bold enough to seek the fulfilment of the individual will, hardy enough to prefer the naked facts of life to the comforting illusions of the imagination. Society is composed, in the main, of Philistines who accept the established social order without demur or misgiving; and of a few Idealists, temperamentally dissatisfied with their lot, yet seeking refuge from the spectacle of their own failure in an imaginary world of romantic ideals, and in the self-delusion that to see the world thus is noble and spiritual, whilst to see it as it is is vulgar, brutal and cynical. But sometimes there arises the solitary pioneer, the realist, if you will—a Blake, a Shelley, a Bashkirtseff, a Shaw—who dares to face the truth the idealists are shirking, to chip off the masks of romance and idealism, and to say fearlessly that life needs no justification and submits to no test; that it must be lived for its own sake as an end in itself, and that all institutions, all ideals, and all romances must be brought to its test and stand or fall by their furtherance of and loyalty to it.
Thus to Ibsen: “The Ideal is dead; long live the ideal!” epitomizes the history of human progress. Brand, the heroic idealist, daring to live largely, to will unreservedly, fails because of his inability to realize the unattainability of his ideals in this present life. As Cervantes in Don Quixote reduced the old ideal of chivalry to absurdity, so Ibsen in Peer Gynt reduces to absurdity the ideal of self-realization when it takes the form of self-gratification unhampered by sense of responsibility. Shaw found it unnecessary to translate the scheme of Emperor and Galilean in terms of the antithesis between idealism and realism, since Julian, in this respect, is only a reincarnation of Peer Gynt. After constructing imaginative projections of himself in Brand, Peer Gynt and Julian, Ibsen next turns to the real life around him, to the creatures of tous les jours, to continue his detailed attack upon idealism. In The Pillars of Society, the Rörlund ideals go down before the realities of truth and freedom; in A Doll's House, Helmer's unstable card-house of ideals falls to the ground; and in Ghosts, Mrs. Alving offers herself up as a living sacrifice on the altar of the ideal, only to discover the futility of the sacrifice. An Enemy of the People exposes the fallacy of the majority ideal, and posits the striking doctrine that to be right is to be in the minority. The Wild Duck appears as a wholesale condemnation of the ideal of truth for truth's sake alone. Rosmersholm embodies Rebekka's tragic protest against the Rosmersholm ideal “that denied her right to live and be happy from the first, and at the end, even in denying its God, exacts her life as a vain blood-offering for its own blindness.” The Lady from the Sea presents a fanciful image of the triumph of responsible freedom over romantic idealism grounded in unhappiness, while in Hedda Gabler the woman rises from life's feast because she has neither the vision for ideals nor the passion for reality—“a pure sceptic, a typical nineteenth-century figure, falling into the abyss between the ideals which do not impose on her and the realities which she has not yet discovered.”
It is needless to follow Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism further, although it might readily be applied to Ibsen's remaining plays. Suffice it to say, that Shaw nowhere denies that Ibsen is an idealist, or that ideals are indispensable to human progress. He has been forced to call Ibsen a realist; in fact, almost to invent new terms, a new phraseology, in order to distinguish between the ideals which have become pernicious through senescence, and the ideals which remain valid through conformity to reality. Out of Ibsen's very longing for the ideal grew that mood of ideal suspiciousness which Brandes, like Shaw, affirmed to be one of his dominant characteristics. Ibsen opposes current political and moral values, strong in the conviction that every end should be challenged to justify the means. Acceptance of Ibsen's philosophy to will greatly, to dare nobly, to be always prepared to violate the code of conventional morality, to find fulfilment of the will as much in voluntary submission to reality as in affirmation of life the eternal—must at once, Shaw rightly indicates, greatly deepen the sense of moral responsibility. “What Ibsen insists on is that there is no golden rule—that conduct must justify itself by its effect upon happiness and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal.”[125]
Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism holds out a large, sane, tolerant standard of life as the inevitable lesson of Ibsen's plays. Lies, pretences, and hypocrisies avail not against the strong man, fortified in the resolution to find himself, to attain self-realization, through fulfilment of the will. However much one may regret that Shaw, by preserving his postulata in concrete terms, has to some extent diverted our attention from the whole formidable significance of the Ibsenic drama, it is idle to deny that the book is at once caustically powerful and unflaggingly brilliant. Certainly Shaw has seen Ibsen clearly, even if he has not seen him whole. Ibsen cannot be summed up in a thesis; the curve of his art, as Mr. Huneker says, reaches across the edge of the human soul. “The quintessence of Ibsenism is that there is no formula”—this is Shaw's last assurance to us that he has not reduced Ibsen to a formula. It is impossible for anyone, with greater assurance, to assure us that there is nothing assured.
William Archer.
From the original pencil sketch.
Jessie Holliday.
Courtesy of the Artist.
Comprehension of Shaw's attitude towards Shakespeare and Ibsen is a prerequisite to an accurate judgment of his attitude towards dramatic art in general, and, more particularly, towards the contemporary British stage. Beneath all his criticism lay the belief that the theatre of to-day is as important an institution as the Church was in the Middle Ages. “The apostolic succession from Eschylus to myself,” he recently said, in speaking of his Saturday Review period, “is as serious and as continuously inspired as that younger institution, the apostolic succession of the Christian Church. Unfortunately this Christian Church, founded gaily with a pun, has been so largely corrupted by rank Satanism that it has become the Church where you must not laugh; and so it is giving way to that older and greater Church to which I belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good-fellowship without mawkishness. When I wrote, I was well aware of what an unofficial census of Sunday worshippers presently proved, that church-going in London has been largely replaced by play-going. This would be a very good thing if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armoury against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man. I took it seriously in that way, and preached about it instead of merely chronicling its news and alternately petting and snubbing it as a licentious but privileged form of public entertainment. And this, I believe, is why my sermons gave so little offence, and created so much interest.”[126] Although plays have neither political constitutions nor established churches, they must all, if they are to be anything more than the merest tissue of stage effects, have a philosophy even if it be no more than an unconscious expression of the author's temperament. Just as nowadays all the philosophers maintain intimate relations with the fine arts, so conversely the great dramatists have at all times maintained intimate relations with philosophy. William Archer used often to tell Shaw that he (Shaw) had no real love of art, no enjoyment of it, only a faculty for observing performances, and an interest in the intellectual tendency of plays. One may retort in Shaw's own words: “In all the life that has energy enough to be interesting to me, subjective volition, passion, will, make intellect the merest tool.” It is significant of much that, to Shaw, the play is not the thing, but its thought, its purpose, its feeling, its execution. Indeed, he regarded the theatre as a response to our need for a “sensable expression of our ideals and illusions and approvals and resentments.” In comparing the dramatic standards of Archer and himself, Shaw exhibits a passion for feeling little suspected by his critics: “Every element, even though it be an element of artistic force, which interferes with the credibility of the scene, wounds him, and is so much to the bad. To him acting, like scene-painting, is merely a means to an end, that end being to enable him to make-believe. To me the play is only the means, the end being the expression of feeling by the arts of the actor, the poet, the musician. Anything that makes this impression more vivid, whether it be versification, or an orchestra, or a deliberately artificial rendition of the lines, is so much to the good for me, even though it may destroy all the verisimilitude of the scene.”
In a review of the London dramatic season of 1904-5 Mr. Walkley made the following characterization of Shaw: