CHAPTER XII
Ibsen made known to the English Public by Mr. Edmund Gosse—The First Translations—Ibsen acted in London—The Performers and the Public—Encounters between the Critics—Mr. Archer once more—Affinity between the Norwegian Character and the English—Ibsen’s Realism suited to English Taste; his Characters adaptable to English Life—The Women in his Plays—Ibsen and Mr. Jones—Present and Future Influence of Ibsen—Objections and Obstacles.
“There is now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive. Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen’s is about to appear.”
It was by these characteristic lines that England learnt of the existence of the singular man who exerts to-day so great an influence over the art and the thought and the moral life of the whole of Europe. He was shut up at that time in his meagre Dano-Norwegian glory, like that genie whom the Eastern tale shows us imprisoned in a bottle. As for the author of the article which brought him before the English public, he was a quite young man, a subtle poet and delicate critic, Mr. Edmund Gosse. Nowadays he occupies in the literary world one of the foremost places amongst those who create and who criticise, but the best pieces of good fortune fall to one’s youth. In his distinguished career as a critic, he has had no more precious stroke of luck than that of the finding of Ibsen, at an age at which as a rule one has been hardly able to find oneself.
Mr. Gosse made known Ibsen’s published works, his historical and historico-legendary dramas, his first efforts towards taking up his position in the domain of modern realism. He showed an indulgent partiality towards The Comedy of Love, and justified it by ingenious translations into verse of his own. He condemned Emperor and Galilean as only a half-success, although his faithful and penetrating analysis of it did no wrong to any of the beauties of the piece. He rendered full justice to the sombre grandeur of Brand and the dazzling fancy of Peer Gynt. In short, he heralded a poet and a satirist. Ibsen has long ago renounced the first of these titles, and as for the second, Mr. Gosse must find him somewhat grêle for the part. He could not, in 1873, foresee the realistic dramatist, the reformer, the psychologist, and the symbolist, who in turn have appeared before us. But he touched the right note, I think, when he paid his homage to Ibsen as “a vast and sinister genius”—“a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire.”
Ibsen entered into correspondence with his young critic, as Goethe before him had done under analogous circumstances with Carlyle. Mr. Gosse was one of the first to be informed of the internal crisis which was transforming the poet’s talent, and which was to be a starting-point for the series of social and psychological dramas. “The play upon which I am now at work, he wrote,”—it was The Pillars of Society,—“will give the spectator exactly the same impression as he would have watching events of real life running their course before his eyes.” The stage was to be merely a room, one of whose walls had been taken down that two thousand people might look on at what was happening inside it. Mr. Gosse entreated the author of Brand and Peer Gynt not to abandon poetry, but Ibsen followed his destiny.
In England they began now to translate him. In 1876 Miss K. Ray gave an English version of Emperor and Galilean; three years later the British Scandinavian Society printed at Gloucester a selection of extracts from his works. In 1882 Miss H. F. Lord translated The Dolls’ House under the title of Norah, and prefixed to it an introduction in which she represented Ibsen as a champion of Woman’s Rights. Women like to form some concrete picture of their friends, and Miss Henrietta Lord was careful to inform her sisters that their defender has a powerful forehead, “a delicate mouth which has no lips, but shuts energetically in a fine line,” small blue eyes that almost disappear behind his spectacles, and a nose quite northern in its irregularity; that he speaks softly, moves slowly, and rarely gesticulates, and that his “self-command amounts to coldness, but it is the snow which covers a volcano of wild and passionate power.” In 1886 Mr. Havelock Ellis published in the Camelot Classics three of Ibsen’s plays, The Pillars of Society, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, accompanied by a general study in which he passed in review the dramas of the social and psychological series, indicative of a strong sympathy with the new ideas and marked in an extreme degree by a fine literary sense. To this library Ondine was added in 1888, and Mr. Gosse returned to the scene to take matters up where he had left them in 1877. Arrived now at the full maturity of his talent, he offered in 1889 an analysis and appreciation of these prose dramas which may be regarded as final in some respects.
It was in the year 1889 that a new period began for Ibsen’s fame and influence in England. People were no longer content to read him, they attempted now to put him on the stage. He was tried at afternoon performances, or, as a last resource, as a fin de saison, when there was nothing any longer to be lost or gained, in some second-rate theatre which was about to be closed, or which might be said to be only half open; a little later he was played under the auspices of the Independent Theatre, which is the Theâtre Libre of London, but which might be called even more aptly the Nomadic Theatre, for it has no home of its own, and has to take refuge, like a tramp, in houses that have no habitant. It may be said that from 1889 to 1893 the Ibsenite drama lived in London a thoroughly Bohemian life, never knowing whether it would dine nor where it would sleep on the morrow. Yet there was a good side to this precarious existence, namely, that there was involved in it no thought or care for the question of shillings and pence. Business men have summed up an undertaking or a man when they have said that it or he “does not pay.” Now Ibsen has never paid. If I might venture to invert that saying of Irving’s which I quoted in a previous chapter, I would affirm that artistic success is most real when business is worst.