Indeed, a crime on which the sacred institution is built, and for which thousands of innocent children must pay with their happiness and life, while their mothers continue to the very end without ever learning how hideously criminal their life is.
Not so Mrs. Alving who, though at a terrible price, works herself out to the truth; aye, even to the height of understanding the dissolute life of the father of her child, who had lived in cramped provincial surroundings, and could find no purpose in life, no outlet for his exuberance. It is through her child, through Oswald, that all this becomes illumed to her.
Oswald. Ah, the joy of life, mother; that's a thing you don't know much about in these parts. I have never felt it here.... And then, too, the joy of work. At bottom, it's the same thing. But that too you know nothing about.... Here people are brought up to believe that work is a curse and a punishment for sin, and that life is something miserable, something we want to be done with, the sooner the better.... Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life? always, always upon the joy of life?—light and sunshine and glorious air, and faces radiant with happiness? That is why I am afraid of remaining at home with you.
Mrs. Alving. Oswald, you spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father when he was a young lieutenant. He was brimming over with the joy of life!... He had no object in life, but only an official position. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant—only loafers and boon companions——.... So that happened which was sure to happen.... Oswald, my dear boy; has it shaken you very much?
Oswald. Of course it came upon me as a great surprise, but, after all, it can't matter much to me.
Mrs. Alving. Can't matter! That your father was so infinitely miserable!
Oswald. Of course I can pity him as I would anybody else; but——
Mrs. Alving. Nothing more? Your own father!
Oswald. Oh, there! "Father," "father"! I never knew anything of father. I don't remember anything about him except—that he once made me sick.
Mrs. Alving. That's a terrible way to speak! Should not a son love his father, all the same?
Oswald. When a son has nothing to thank his father for? has never known him? Do you really cling to the old superstition?—you who are so enlightened in other ways?
Mrs. Alving. Is that only a superstition?
In truth, a superstition—one that is kept like the sword of Damocles over the child who does not ask to be given life, and is yet tied with a thousand chains to those who bring him into a cheerless, joyless, and wretched world.
The voice of Henrik Ibsen in "Ghosts" sounds like the trumpets before the walls of Jericho. Into the remotest nooks and corners reaches his voice, with its thundering indictment of our moral cancers, our social poisons, our hideous crimes against unborn and born victims. Verily a more revolutionary condemnation has never been uttered in dramatic form before or since the great Henrik Ibsen.
We need, therefore, not be surprised at the vile abuse and denunciation heaped upon Ibsen's head by the Church, the State, and other moral eunuchs. But the spirit of Henrik Ibsen could not be daunted. It asserted itself with even greater defiance in "An Enemy of Society,"—a powerful arraignment of the political and economic Lie,—Ibsen's own confession of faith.
[AN ENEMY OF SOCIETY]
Dr. Thomas Stockmann is called to the position of medical adviser to the management of the "Baths," the main resource of his native town.
A sincere man of high ideals, Dr. Stockmann returns home after an absence of many years, full of the spirit of enterprise and progressive innovation. For as he says to his brother Peter, the town Burgomaster, "I am so glad and content. I feel so unspeakably happy in the midst of all this growing, germinating life. After all, what a glorious time we do live in. It is as if a new world were springing up around us."