Themes that revolve about the relations between two successive ages or generations, or simply about the relations between different stages of life, which in Russia, Germany, Denmark, and Norway have been treated in so many different ways, have also occupied Ibsen, during his first period in "Kongs Emnerne" (The Pretenders), during the transition to his second period in "De Unges Forbund" (The Young Men's Union). Both these dramas are remarkable works, but the strength of neither lies in historic insight or historic impartiality.
"The Pretenders" is not really an historic drama; it displays no design on the part of its author to produce, through a series of pictures of the past, a portrayal of human nature as it appears under certain conditions at a defined period. The poet did not proceed from an historic standpoint; he simply used the historic as a pretext. The background of the play is mediæval, the foreground modern, for Skule Jarl is a modern figure. An historic construction would have led to the presentation of Skule as a full-blooded aristocrat, and Bishop Nicolas as a fanatical, yet thoroughly devoted and conscientious clergyman. Skule's conflict with Haakon denotes historically the last unsuccessful attempt of the aristocracy to limit the power of the king; and the bishop's conflict indicates that hatred, which was so well justified from a priestly point of view, against the enemy of the church and usurper Sverre and his race. Instead, Ibsen has transformed Nicolas into a monster, who symbolizes bigotry, envy, and dissension in Norway through long ages, and Skule into an ambitious person who, while striving to attain the highest goal, is at the same time tormented with a wretched doubt of his right and ability to reach it. Haakon and Skule are contrasted as representatives of two epochs,—the age of dissension and the age of union. But, as the poet's interest in the psychological is so much greater than his sense of the historic element, this contrast is thrust into the background by the contrast between the individual characters and their relation to ideas. Haakon represents "the king's thought," which he himself first conceived, and is wholly submerged in this relation. Skule represents no ancient historic idea, but simply lack of self-confidence. He steals Haakon's "king's thought" in order to procure for himself through it a right to the throne. He does not succeed. The skald declares to him that he cannot live for the life-work of another, and he himself recognizes the truth of this. The skald's thought is not expressed with any too great lucidity; for why could not a man live for the ideas of another, if he has himself endeavored to appreciate and transform them into his own flesh and blood, without stealing them, and causing them to pass for his own discovery? The theft, not the fact of living for the ideas of others, would make a person unhappy; and this it is which causes the unhappiness of Skule. The fact is, however, that Ibsen, with the whole intensity of his nature, interests himself more in the struggle that is taking place in the soul of the individual than in any struggle between historic powers. What attracted him to Skule, and made the latter the main personage of the play, was the "interesting" element in the character of Skule,—his complex nature, his struggling soul, which even when in the wrong eclipsed that of the simple-hearted Haakon with his certainty of coming victory. It is the despairing power in the great Nureddin which, in spite of his craving for the lamp, in spite of the theft of the lamp, is doomed to ruin. It is the representation of a soul whose aspiration is greater than its ability to rise; and this same representation it is that is varied in Bishop Nicolas, whose gigantic powers are wrecked in partly physical, partly spiritual, but wholly powerless yearning and craving. It is the relation between the ability and the desire, between the will and the possibility, in the soul of the individual, this relation which is already indicated in Catiline and in Gunnar in "The Warriors of Helgeland," which is brought forward anew in the relation of Skule to Haakon's thought. Skule stands in the same relation to the "king's thought" as Julian to Christianity. Filled with a foreboding of the greatness of the power he is combating, he holds an irreconcilably distorted relation to the great, victorious idea. The psychological interest completely routs the historic.
The relation between two succeeding generations is again represented in "The Young Men's Union," a drama which furnishes in an extremely witty manner a parody on the efforts of the younger generation, without at the same time offering any justification for these efforts. This work cannot be compared with such works as Turgenief's "Fathers and Sons," or "Virgin Soil," which unite relentless severity against the elder generation with their stem judgments on the younger, and at the same time extend to both thorough sympathy and comprehension. Ibsen's pessimism has repelled his sympathy. The sole honorable representative of the younger generation in the play last mentioned is Dr. Fjeldbo, a man of a thoroughly passive nature. That he is a physician is scarcely a matter of pure accident. The skilful physician plays, on the whole, a striking rôle in modern poetry; he is evidently the hero of the day. The cause of this is, doubtless, that he can be used as the incarnation of the ideals of the age, those strictly modern ideals, which are in respect to theory science, with its relationship to the true and the false, in respect to practice humanity, with its relationship to happiness and suffering, the opposing psychologic and social forces that claim the attention of the age.
In the dramas of Schiller, as well as in those of modern Germany, the struggle for political and spiritual freedom plays a prominent rôle. Class distinctions, too, are a favorite theme in various German dramas of an earlier period, even though it had not then become customary for poetry to deal with what is called at the present time the social problem. A glimmer of the latter appeared much earlier in the French drama, from the days of Beaumarchais to those of Victor Hugo, as this question had become a burning one in public discussion in France far earlier than elsewhere. In the polite literature of our day, the social question has gradually banished the political from its high seat. Modern poetry, in many lands, is inspired by sympathy with the poor and lowly; it reminds those who are well placed in life of their duties. The question is not one of those that have chiefly occupied Ibsen, and yet he has touched upon it. When he wrote "Catiline," he was too undeveloped to comprehend the social problem aright; but many years later, in "Samfundets Stötter" (The Pillars of Society), he aimed a blow at the leading circles of his fatherland. The play is wholly without a socialistic tendency, as is well known, yet so profound is its pessimism that those who are unfamiliar with Norwegian affairs, especially with the attitude of the poet to his public and to the various parties of his native land, might take it for granted that there was a tendency of the kind in the work. When it was played in Berlin, many spectators (and, it may safely be asserted, not those who were by any means lacking in judgment) yielded to the error that it was written by a socialist. I was myself obliged to assure many people that its author was, on the contrary, the favorite poet (at that time) of the conservative party in Norway. In "The Pillars of Society," which has the effect of a supplement to "The Young Men's Union," the two sides of the question are as little apparent as in the last-named comedy. Ibsen proceeds here, as everywhere else, from a one-sided point of view.
The relation between man and woman is one of those that has most intensely absorbed Ibsen, and in regard to which he has cherished the most original and the most modern sentiments.
In his first youthful works this relation is treated somewhat in the traditional way. He attacks in his "Gildet paa Solhaug" (Banquet at Solhaug) the same theme Björnson has chosen for his "Halte Hulda" (Lame Hulda); that is, the position of a young man between the woman a little older than himself whom he has loved in his youth, and the young girl whom he longs with his whole heart to make his bride,—a theme both human and universal, yet one that has frequently been varied. He next represents, in his "Catiline" and in his "Fru Inger til Österaat" (Mistress Inger at Österaat) the same rather forced yet stirring motive, how a man who had led a licentious life in his youth is punished through his love for a young girl who at the same time loves, abhors, and curses him, because he had betrayed her sister and sent her to her grave.
In his "Kjærlighedens Komedie" (Love's Comedy), Ibsen for the first time takes up the erotic condition of his fatherland for his theme. He had apparently received no trifling stimulus from contemporary Norwegian literature. While Björnson during his first period was influenced by popular tradition and popular poetry, Ibsen was incited to action in his early days by the most advanced thinkers of the time. There is something in the inspiration of "Love's Comedy" that may be traced back to Camilla Collet's "Amtmandens Dötre" (The Magistrate's Daughters). The latter daring book at that time occupied every Norwegian mind; and it contained the same witty, though rather less well planned attack on betrothals and marriages that in Ibsen's drama is conducted by a firm, manly hand. So far as similes and figures are concerned, the influence of Camilla Collet is very perceptible. Ibsen's celebrated "tea-comparison" is derived from her. In "The Magistrate's Daughters" we read of love, as follows:—
"Guard, O mankind, this our life's first bloom.... Heed its growth and its fruit.... Do not lightly disturb its tender, budding leaf, in the belief that the coarse blossoms that come later are good enough.... No; they are not good enough. There is as great a difference between the two kinds, as there is between the tea we ordinary mortals must be content with, and that which the emperor of the Celestial Kingdom drinks, and which is the only genuine tea; it is gathered first, and is so delicate and tender that it must be plucked with gloves, after the gleaners have washed twenty-four times."
Henrik Ibsen writes:—
"Ah, ladies, in your hearts, you one and all
A special small Celestial Empire hold,
Where many precious budding germs unfold
Behind your maidenhood's crumbling Chinese wall."