words in which a more hideous abyss yawns between the husband and wife that sit opposite each other at table than the nether world ever opened in the old dramas of romance, we feel, indeed, that Ibsen has not merely filled his soul with the thoughts of the age; he has fashioned them on a grander scale than any one else, he has ground them until they are sharper than in the hands of others, so that with his consummate art he can make them penetrate even the most hardened hearts. This drama produced a powerful, although alarming effect. For centuries society, through its priests and poets, had conceived of marriage, founded in love and undisturbed by the influence of a third person, as a sure haven of bliss, and had celebrated it as such in song. Now it was discovered that this haven was full of rocks and shoals. It actually seemed as though Ibsen had extinguished all the beacon lights.
"Gjengangere" (Apparitions) followed. Here, again, as in "A Model Home," a marriage was analyzed, the opposite of the one in the last-named drama. The grandeur and exquisite delicacy of "A Model Home" consisted chiefly in the fact that Ibsen had conceded so much to the husband. For what had he not conceded to this man! He is a thoroughly honorable, conscientiously upright man, an excellent provider for his family, a man who is properly jealous of his independence in his dealings with strangers and subordinates, a strict and loving father, a good-hearted, highly cultivated man,—and yet! Yet this man's wife was a victim, and his marriage a whited sepulchre.
The man into whose marriage we gain deep insight in "Apparitions" is a person of a totally opposite character; he is a coarse-natured drunkard, is recklessly dissolute, yet is endowed with so many of those qualities licentious men often have at their command with which to win hearts, and knows how to make himself so agreeable, that it is possible for his wife to screen his life and save appearances. By remaining with him, by giving herself to him, she not only sacrifices her own welfare and happiness, she also becomes the mother of a being whose life is wrecked from birth, a son who is overtaken by deadly impotence, despair, insanity, and idiocy, as he crosses the threshold of manhood,—and yet! Yet that portion of the community which is represented by Pastor Manders deems her sacrifice of herself and her son her simple duty, and her attempted revolt at her hideous fate a crime.
This is the pathos of the play, and this same pathos it was that terrified the great Philistine world more than "A Model Home" had done. This time it seemed as though the stars had been extinguished by Ibsen. "Not the faintest ray of light appears."
The relation between man and woman in "Apparitions" is placed in a totally new light, inasmuch as it is measured by responsibility to the child. The drama treats, in a poetic form, the thought of heredity, represents, on the basis of that determinism which is the latest word of modern science on the question, the dependence of the child's destiny on the parents, and gives this fact a background of a nature calculated to arouse profound thought and feeling by indicating the more universal fact to which the title points; namely, the hereditary transmission of emotions (and through these of dogmas) whose essential conditions are extinct, and have given place to others at variance with these emotions.
In close relation to Ibsen's psychological development there is associated a principal interest in this grasp or choice of themes, inasmuch as we here for the first time see the great dramatist break the circle it has been the wont of his disposition to cast about the single individual. In a letter of the year 1871, Ibsen wrote me the following words, which are indicative of much in his character:—
"To tell the truth, I have never had a very great fancy for solidarity. I have, indeed, only taken it into my cargo as a matter of traditional dogmatism. If we only had the courage to leave it entirely out of consideration, we might possibly become rid of the ballast that weighs most heavily on personality...."
Now, ten years later, his eyes are opened to the significance of solidarity; he has become thoroughly convinced that "courage" is of no avail in the attempt to cast it overboard, and that we are all from our birth consolidated with persons and things in a way we ourselves cannot control. Evidently, as years pass on, Ibsen enters into a more and more intimate relation with the fundamental ideas of the age.
Thus we see him, who at first, with almost all the now living older writers of the day, stood waist-deep in the romantic period, gradually work his way out of it, and become more and more modern, until finally he grows to be the most modern of modern writers. In my estimation, this is his imperishable glory, and will invest his works with enduring life. For the modern is not the ephemeral; it is the vital flame itself, the life-spark, the ideal soul of an age.
The ill feeling aroused by "Apparitions" in many circles, and the coarse criticism aimed at the drama, could have no power to repress Ibsen's literary productivity, but at first it had a very depressing effect on him. He wrote of it:—