The New Spirit / Third Edition

by Havelock Ellis

As “The Doll’s House” is the tragedy of marriage, so “Ghosts” is the tragedy of heredity. This wonderful play is the logical outcome and continuation of “The Doll’s House.” Mrs. Alving is a Nora who had resolved to cling to her husband in spite of all, and here is the result. She is a woman of energy and intellect, who has managed the estate, and devoted herself successfully to the task of creating an artificial odour of sanctity around the memory of her late husband. At the same time she has been gradually throwing aside the precepts of the morality in which she has been educated, and has learned to think for herself. When her son Oswald returns home, in reality dying of disease that has been latent from his birth, he seems to her the ghost of his father. His own life has been free from excess, but he now drinks too much; and he begins to make love to the girl who is really his half-sister, exactly as his father had done to her mother in the same place. The scene finally closes over the first clear signs of his madness. The irony of the play is chiefly brought about by the involuntary agency of Pastor Manders, the consummate flower of conventional morality, and in the few hours which the action covers the tragedy of heredity is slowly and relentlessly unfolded, with the vanity of all efforts to conceal or suppress the great natural forces of life.

In “Ghosts,” it seems to me, Ibsen reached the highest point of his art. He deals here with commonplace characters and everyday scenes; most of the action is conveyed in mere drawing-room dialogue; but we feel how the clearness and completeness of this play, its tragic intensity, its immense concentration, have at the back the whole of Ibsen’s various achievement. When we reach the end we experience that prolonged shudder of horror, in which, as Aristotle said, the purification of tragedy lies, and we involuntarily recall whatever is most awful in literature, the “Oresteia” of Æschylus, Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Shelley’s “Cenci.” It is only on more intimate acquaintance that we are able to look beyond the horror of it, and that we realize here, better than elsewhere, how Ibsen has absorbed the scientific influences of his time, the attitude of unlimited simplicity and trust in the face of reality. “I almost think,” Mrs. Alving says, “that we are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us,—it is all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea.” There is the absolute acceptance of facts, however disagreeable. But, beside it, is the hope that lies in the skilful probing of the wound that the ignorant have foolishly smothered up; the hope also that lies in a glad trust of nature and of natural instincts. Nowhere else in Ibsen’s work can we feel so strong and invigorating a breath of new life.

“An Enemy of Society” is closely connected in its origin with “Ghosts.” When “Ghosts” was published it aroused fierce antagonism. Such a subject was not suited, it was said, to artistic treatment. The discussion was foolish enough; the wise saying of Goethe still remains true, that “no real circumstance is unpoetic so long as the poet knows how to use it.” All the worthy people, however, in whose name Pastor Manders is entitled to speak, declared, further, that the play was immoral—as it certainly is from their point of view—and it was some time before its first representation on the stage, with the distinguished northern actor, Lindberg, in the part of Oswald. Ibsen had expected a storm, but the storm was even greater than he had anticipated; and in the history of Dr. Stockmann he has given an artistic version of his own experiences at this time. It is pleasant that the only figure in these plays that we can intimately associate with Ibsen himself is that of the manly and genial Stockmann. When he discovers that the water at the Baths, of which he is the medical director, and which are the chief cause of the town’s prosperity, are infected and producing disastrous results to the invalids, he resolves that the matter shall at once be made known and remedied. It is in the shock of the universal disapprobation that this resolution arouses that our genial and homely doctor is lifted into heroism, and becomes the mouthpiece of truths with far-reaching significance. The great scene in the fourth act, in which he calls a public meeting as the only remaining way to make his discovery public, and, amid general clamour, sets forth his opinions, is one of the most powerful and genuinely dramatic that Ibsen has ever written.

“The Wild Duck” is, as a drama, the least remarkable of Ibsen’s plays of this group. There is no central personage who absorbs our attention, and no great situation. For the first time also we detect a certain tendency to mannerism, and the dramatist’s love of symbolism, here centred in the wild duck, becomes obtrusive and disturbing. Yet this play has a distinct and peculiar interest for the student of Ibsen’s works. The satirist who has so keenly pursued others has never spared himself; in the lines that he has set at the end of the charming little volume in which he has collected his poems, he declares that, “to write poetry is to hold a doomsday over oneself.” Or, as he has elsewhere expressed it: “All that I have written corresponds to something that I have lived through, if not actually experienced. Every new poem has served as a spiritual process of emancipation and purification.” In both “Brand” and “Peer Gynt” we may detect this process. In “The Wild Duck” Ibsen has set himself on the side of his enemies, and written, as a kind of anti-mask to “The Doll’s House” and “The Pillars of Society,” a play in which, from the standpoint to which the dramatist has accustomed us, everything is topsy-turvy. Gregers Werle is a young man, possessing something of the reckless will-power of Brand, who is devoted to the claims of the ideal, and who is doubtless an enthusiastic student of Ibsen’s social dramas. On returning home after a long absence he learns that his father has provided for a cast-off mistress by marrying her to an unsuspecting man who is an old friend of Gregers’. He resolves at once that it is his duty at all costs to destroy the element of falsehood in this household, and to lay the foundations of a true marriage. His interference ends in disaster; the weak average human being fails to respond properly to “the claims of the ideal;” while Werle’s father, the chief pillar of conventional society in the play, spontaneously forms a true marriage, founded on mutual confessions and mutual trust. If the play may be regarded, not quite unfairly, as a burlesque of possible deductions from the earlier plays, it witnesses also, like “Ghosts,” to Ibsen’s profound conviction that all vital development must be spontaneous and from within, conditioned by the nature of the individual.

In “The Wild Duck” Ibsen approaches in his own manner, without, however, much insistence, the mural aspects of the equality of the sexes. Is a woman, who has had no relationships with a man before marriage, entitled to expect the same in her husband? Is a man, who has had relationships with other women before marriage, entitled to complain if his wife has also had such relationships? These are the sort of questions which the Scandinavian and Danish dramatists—Björnson, Eduard Brandes, Charlotte Edgren, Benzon—seem never tired of discussing. Eduard Brandes makes his admirable little drama “Et Besög,” published about the same time as “Vildanden,” hang on this problem, and although he brings no new idea into the play, he settles the question in the same spirit as his great fellow-dramatist. “En Hanske,” also published about the same time, gives us Björnson’s contribution to the question. In this play a young woman is in love with a young man who, as she learns accidentally at the moment of formally engaging herself to him, has had previous relationships with other women. At the same time she discovers that her own father, an amiable old élégant, has been frequently unfaithful to his wife, and that her mother still carries about a suppressed bitterness. The girl realizes that life is not like what she has been brought up to believe; she rejects her lover, and after some unexpected and quite unnecessary brutalities from him, flings her glove in his face. All Björnson’s genial vivacity and emotional expansiveness come out in the earlier scenes of this play, and there is some pleasant comedy, especially when the easy-going father tries to lecture his daughter, to the accompaniment of her acute comments and the wife’s sarcastic exclamations, on a wife’s privileges. “Here,” he says, “is woman’s noblest calling.” “As what?” asks the daughter. “As what?—Have you not listened? As—as the ennobling influence in marriage, as that which makes man purer, as, as——” “Soap?” “Soap? what on earth makes you think of soap?” “You make out that marriage is a great laundry for men. We girls are to stand ready, each at her wash-tub, with her piece of soap. Is that how you mean it?” On this ground, however, it is difficult to avoid comparisons with Ibsen, and we miss here both the artistic and moral grip of the greater dramatist. Ibsen’s solution of the matter in “The Wild Duck” seems to be that there can be no true marriage without mutual knowledge and mutual confession.

In “Rosmersholm,” social questions have passed into the background: they are present, indeed, throughout; and to some extent they cause the tragedy of the drama, as the numberless threads that bind a man to his past, and that cut and oppress him when he strives to take a step forward. But on this grey background the passionate figure of Rebecca West forms a vivid and highly-wrought portrait. Ibsen has rarely shown such intimate interest in the development of passion. The whole life and soul of this ardent, silent woman, whom we see in the first scene quietly working at her crochet, while the housekeeper prepares the supper, are gradually revealed to us in brief flashes of light between the subsidiary episodes, until at last she ascends and disappears down the inevitable path to the mill stream. The touches which complete this picture are too many and too subtle to allow of analysis; in the last scene Ibsen’s concentrated prose reaches as high a pitch of emotional intensity as he has ever cared to attain.

“The Lady from the Sea” seems to carry us into an atmosphere rather different from that of the early social dramas. An element of melodrama mingles here with the social interest, and makes this play one of the least characteristic, but certainly one of the most dramatically effective of the group. Ellida, a morbid, romantic young woman, whose mother died insane, has met before her marriage the second mate of an American ship, a “stranger;” he attracts her with all the charm of the wild life of the sea and the fascination of the unknown. Having perpetrated a more or less justifiable homicide, the second mate is compelled to flee, not before he has gone through a form of betrothal with Ellida. Subsequently she marries a well-meaning, commonplace widower, but she wanders helplessly and uselessly through life, like a mermaid among the children of men, still held, in spite of herself, by the old fascination of the sea. At length the mysterious “stranger” turns up again, resolved, if she wishes, to carry her off in spite of everything. She feels that she must be free—free to go or free to stay. The husband, naturally, refuses to hear of this, proposes to send the man about his business. At length he consents to allow her to choose as she will. Then at once she feels able to decide against the “stranger,” who leaps over the wall and disappears. The charm is broken for ever, and she has the chance to make something of her life. The moral is evident: without freedom of choice there can be no real emancipation or development.

The men of our own great dramatic period wrote plays which are the expression of mere gladness of heart and childlike pleasure in the splendid and various spectacle of the world. Hamlet and Falstaff, the tragic De Flores and the comic Simon Eyre, they are all merely parts of the play. It is all play. The breath of Ariosto’s long song of delight and Boccaccio’s virile joy in life was still on these men, and for the organization of society, or even for the development and fate of the individual save as a spectacle, they took little thought. In the modern world this is no longer possible; rather, it is only possible for an occasional individual who is compelled to turn his back on the world. Ibsen, like Aristophanes, like Molière, and like Dumas to-day, has given all his mature art and his knowledge of life and men to the service of ideas. “Overthrowing society means an inverted pyramid getting straight”—one of the audacious sayings of James Hinton—might be placed as a motto on the title-page of all Ibsen’s later plays. His work throughout is the expression of a great soul crushed by the weight of an antagonistic social environment into utterance that has caused him to be regarded as the most revolutionary of modern writers.

An artist and thinker, whose gigantic strength has been nourished chiefly in solitude, whose works have been, as he himself says in one of his poems, “deeds of night,” written from afar, can never be genuinely popular. Everything that he writes is received in his own country with attention and controversy; but he is mistaken for a cynic and pessimist; he is not loved in Norway as Björnson is loved, although Björnson, in the fruitful dramatic activity of his second period, has but followed in Ibsen’s steps;—just as Goethe was never so well understood and appreciated as Schiller. Björnson, with his genial exuberance, his popular sympathies and hopes, never too far in advance of his fellows, invigorates and refreshes like one of the forces of nature. He represents the summer side of his country, in its bright warmth and fragrance. Ibsen, standing alone in the darkness in front, absorbed in the problems of human life, indifferent to the aspects of external nature, has closer affinities to the stern winter-night of Norway. But there is a mighty energy in this man’s work. The ideas and instincts, developed in silence, which inspire his art, are of the kind that penetrate men’s minds slowly. Yet they penetrate surely, and are proclaimed at length in the market-place.