Figures of Several Centuries

by Arthur Symons

In The League of Youth Ibsen takes finally the step which he had half taken in Loves Comedy. 'In my new comedy,' he writes to Dr. Brandes, 'you will find the common order of things—no strong emotions, no deep feelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts.' He adds: 'It is written in prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I have paid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I have accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact without a single "aside." 'The play is hardly more than a good farce; the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probability on the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order of things' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but the satirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and no doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to get the mechanism in order.

After The League of Youth Ibsen tells us that he tried to 'seek salvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old scheme for a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act plays which make up Emperor and Galilean. He tells us that it is the first work which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that it contains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demanded of me so long.' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirely realistic work,' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual life which I am putting into this book ... and the historical subject chosen has a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own time than one might at first imagine.' How great a relief it must have been, after the beer and sausages of The League of Youth, to go back to an old cool wine, no one can read Emperor and Galilean and doubt. It is a relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial, the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever Peer Gynt was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the book is or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw a fragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried to reproduce what I saw.' But in the play itself this intention comes and goes; and, while some of it reminds one of Salammbô in its attempt to treat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to the exposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance, after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers of historical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideas more fundamental than anything in The League of Youth; but, as in almost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point, satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is not yet, as the later irony is to be, a deepening, and thus a justification, of the realism.

Eight years passed between The League of Youth and The Pillars of Society; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has made for itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; the mechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a more conventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place of satire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concerned with society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusation against society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling of a lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be saying to us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools of society. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here is your respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father and your mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of heredity whispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hidden behind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world.

Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that Ghosts 'preaches nothing at all.' This pursuit of truth to its most secret hiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogma visibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogma is terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless, we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I would take A Doll's House, Ghosts, and The Wild Duck as Ibsen's three central plays, the plays in which his method completely attained its end, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; and this work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, is alive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, An Enemy of the People, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had attacked Ghosts for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission. Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people who suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies, are terribly alive. A Doll's House is the first of Ibsen's plays in which the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfected his art of illusion; beyond A Doll's House and Ghosts dramatic illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles, but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet.

For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With The Wild Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination. The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and is discontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He would extend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to be extended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in The Wild Duck passes, in Rosmersholm, in which the problems of Love's Comedy are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form, not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In The Lady from the Sea, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Is it not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Is it not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality and giving us no spiritual reality in its place?

Hedda Gabler is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:

It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day.'

The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of 'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in The Master-builder it is 'harps in the air'; in Little Eyolf it takes human form and becomes the Rat-wife; in John Gabriel Borkman it drops to the tag of 'a dead man and two shadows'; in When we Dead Awaken there is nothing but icy allegory. All that queer excitement of The Master-builder, that 'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself at home there? is it not rather Peer Gynt back again, and the ride through the air on the back of the reindeer?

In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back, though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife in Little Eyolf; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination, neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In John Gabriel Borkman, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no longer content to concern himself with the old material, lies or misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but will have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In When we Dead Awaken all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look their parts.