IBSEN (pp. 50-52)
Ibsen’s last, John Gabriel Borkman, is a wonderfully fine play, far better than any others by Ibsen that I have read or seen, but I can imagine it would lose a good deal in an English translation. The acting of the two middle-aged sisters who are the protagonists was marvellous. The men were a good deal more difficult to hear, but also very striking. Next to the fineness of the play (which has far more poetry in it than any others of his I’ve read, though of course there’s a bank in the background, as there always seems to be in Ibsen)—the apathy of the very crowded house struck me most. There was very little clapping at the end at the acts: at the end of the play none, which was just as well because one of them was dead and would have had to jump up again. So altogether I am very much struck by my first German theatre, though the fineness of the play may have much to do with it. It was just a little spoilt by the last Act being in a pine forest on a hill with sugar that was meant to look like snow. This rather took away from the effect of the scene, which in the German is one of the finest things I have ever heard, possessing throughout a wonderful rhythm which may or may not exist in the original. What a beautiful language it can be! (13 February 1914.)
I have been reading many criticisms of John Gabriel Borkman, and it strikes me more and more that it is the most remarkable play I have ever read. It is head and shoulders above the others of Ibsen’s I know: a much broader affair. John Gabriel Borkman is a tremendous character. His great desire, which led him to overstep the law for one moment, and of course he was caught and got eight years, was “Menschenglück zu schaffen.” One moment Ibsen lets you see one side of his character (the side he himself saw) and you see the Perfect Altruist: the next moment the other side is turned, and you see the Complete Egoist. The play all takes place in the last three hours of J. G. B.’s life, and in these three hours his real love, whom he had rejected for business reasons and married her twin-sister, shows him for the first time the Egoist that masqueraded all its life as Altruist. The technique is perfect and it bristles with minor problems. It is absolutely fair, for if J. G. B. had sacrificed his ideals and married the right twin, he would not have been deserted after his disgrace. And the way that during the three hours the whole past history of the man comes out is marvellous. The brief dialogue between the sisters which closes the piece is fine, and suddenly throws a new light on the problem of how the tragedy could have been evaded, when you thought all that could be said had been said. (20 February 1914.)
I feel that this visit to Schwerin will spoil me for the theatre for the rest of my life. I have never ceased to see John Gabriel Borkman mentally since my second visit to it (when the acting was even liner than before and struck me as a perfect presentation of a perfect play). My only regret was that the whole family wasn’t there as well. I should so like to talk it over with you, and the way that at the very end of his last play Ibsen sums up the object against which all his battle was directed: “Es war viel mehr die Kälte die ihn tötete.” “Die Kälte, sagst du, die Kälte! die hat ihn schon längst getötet.”... “Ja, die Herzenskälte.” (10 April 1914.)
[The play] at the Königliches Schauspielhaus [Berlin] was Ibsen’s Peer Gynt with Grieg’s incidental music—the Northern Faust, as it is called: though the mixture of allegory and reality is not carried off so successfully as in the Southern Faust. Peer Gynt has the advantage of being a far more human and amiable creature, and not a cold fish like Faust. I suppose that difference is also to be found in the characters of the respective authors. I always wanted to know why Faust had no relations to make demands on him. Peer Gynt is a charmingly light piece, with an irresistible mixture of fantastical poetry and a very racy humour. The scene where Peer returns to his blind and dying mother and, like a practical fellow, instead of sentimentalizing, sits himself on the end of her bed, persuades her it is a chariot and rides her up to heaven, describing the scenes on the way, the surliness of St Peter at the gate, the appearance of God the Father, who “put Peter quite in the shade” and decided to let mother Aasa in, was delightful. The acting was of course perfect. (5 June 1914.)
III
THE ODYSSEY ([p. 73])
The Odyssey is a great joy when once you can read it in big chunks and not a hundred lines at a time, being [forced] to note all the silly grammatical strangenesses. I could not read it in better surroundings for the whole tone of the book is so thoroughly German and domestic. A friend of sorts of the ——s died lately; and when the Frau attempted to break the news to Karl at table, he immediately said “Don’t tell me anything sad while I’m eating.” That very afternoon I came across someone in the Odyssey who made, under the same circumstances, precisely the same remark[1]. In the Odyssey and in Schwerin alike they are perfectly unaffected about their devotion to good food. In both too I find the double patriotism which suffers not a bit from its duplicity—in the Odyssey to their little Ithaca as well as to Achaea as a whole; here equally to the Kaiser and the pug-nosed Grand Duke. In both is the habit of longwinded anecdotage in the same rambling irrelevant way, and the quite unquenchable hospitality. And the Helen of the Odyssey bustling about a footstool for Telemachus or showing off her new presents (she had just returned from a jaunt to Egypt)—a washing-tub, and a work-basket that ran on wheels (think!)—is the perfect German Hausfrau. (27 March 1914.)
If I had the smallest amount of patience, steadiness or concentrative faculty, I could write a brilliant book comparing life in Ithaca, Sparta and holy Pylos in the time of Odysseus with life in Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the time of Herr Dr ——. In both you get the same unquenchable hospitality and perfectly unquenchable anecdotage faculty. In both whenever you make a visit or go into a house, they are “busying themselves with a meal.” Du lieber Karl (I mean Herr Dr ——) has three times, when his wife has tried to talk of death, disease or crime by table, unconsciously given a literal translation of Peisistratus’s sound remark οὐ γὰρ ἐγώ γε τέρπουʹ ὀδυρόμενος μεταδόρπιοσ[2]—and that is their attitude to meals throughout. Need I add the ἀγλαὰ δῶρα they insist on giving their guests, with the opinion that it is the host that is the indebted party and the possession of a guest confers honour and responsibility: and their innate patriotism, the οὔ τοι ἐγώ γε ἦς γαίης δύναμαι γλυκερώτερον ἄλλο ἰδέσθαι[3] spirit (however dull it is)—to complete the parallel? So I am really reading it in sympathetic surroundings, and when I have just got past the part where Helen shows off to Menelaus her new work-basket that runs on wheels, and the Frau rushes in to show me her new water-can with a spout designed to resemble a pig—I see the two are made from the same stuff (I mean, of course, Helen and Frau ——, not Frau —— and the pig). Also, I enjoy being able to share in a quiet amateur way with Odysseus his feelings about “were it but the smoke leaping up from his own land.” (23 April 1914.)
Good luck to Helen of Troy. As you say, she loved her own sex as well. Her last appearance in Homer is when Telemachus was just leaving her and Menelaus after paying them a visit in Sparta, and she stood on the doorstep with a robe in her hand and spoke a word and called him ‘I also am giving thee a gift, dear child,—this, a memorial of Helen’s handiwork, against the day of thy marriage to which we all look forward, that thou mayest give it to thy wife: till then, let it be stored in thy palace under thy mother’s care.’” But she never gives to me the impression in Homer of being quite happy. I’m sure she was always dull down in Sparta with fatherly old Menelaus—though she never showed it of course. But there is always something a little wistful in her way of speaking. She only made other people happy and consequently another set of other people miserable. One of the best things in the Iliad is the way you are made to feel (without any statement) that Helen fell really in love with Hector—and this shows her good taste, for of all the Homeric heroes Hector is the only unselfish man. She seems to me only to have loved to please Menelaus and Paris but to have really loved Hector—and naturally for Hector and Achilles, the altruist and the egoist, were miles nobler than any one else on either side—but Hector never gave any sign that he regarded her as anything more than his distressed sister-in-law. But after Hector’s death she must have left part of her behind her, and made a real nice wife to poor pompous Menelaus in his old age. She seems to have had a marvellous power of adaptability. (April 1914.)