In the character of Bishop Nicholas, too, Ibsen has widened and deepened his historical material rather than poetised with a free hand. “Bishop Nicholas,” says Sars, “represented rather the aristocracy ... than the cloth to which he belonged. He had begun his career as a worldly chieftain, and, as such, taken part in Magnus Erlingsson’s struggles with Sverre; and although he must have had some tincture of letters, since he could contrive to be elected a bishop ... there is no lack of indications that his spiritual lore was not of the deepest. During his long participation in the civil broils, both under Sverre and later, we see in him a man to whose character any sort of religious or ecclesiastical enthusiasm must have been foreign, his leading motives being personal ambition and vengefulness rather than any care for general interests—a cold and calculating nature, shrewd but petty and without any impetus, of whom Håkon Håkonsson, in delivering his funeral speech ... could find nothing better to say than that he had not his equal in worldly wisdom (veraldar vit).” I cannot find that the Bishop played any such prominent part in the struggle between the King and the Earl as Ibsen assigns to him, and the only foundation for the great death-bed scene seems to be the following passage from Håkon Håkonsson’s Saga, Cap. 138: “As Bishop Nicholas at that time lay very sick, he sent a messenger to the King praying him to come to him. The King had on this expedition seized certain letters, from which he gathered that the Bishop had not been true to him. With this he upbraided him, and the Bishop, confessing it, prayed the King to forgive him. The King replied that he did so willingly, for God’s sake; and as he could discern that the Bishop lay near to death, he abode with him until God called him from the world.”
In the introduction to The Vikings at Helgeland I have suggested that in that play Ibsen had reached imaginative and technical maturity, but was as yet intellectually immature. The six years that elapsed between The Vikings and The Pretenders placed him at the height of his intellectual power. We have only to compare Skule, Håkon, and Bishop Nicholas with Gunnar, Sigurd, and Örnulf to feel that we have passed from nobly-designed and more or less animated waxworks to complex and profoundly-studied human beings. There is no Hiördis in The Pretenders, and the female character-drawing is still controlled by purely romantic ideals;[[6]] but how exquisitely human is Margrete in comparison with the almost entirely conventional Dagny! The criticism of life, too, which in The Vikings is purely sentimental, here becomes intense and searching. The only point of superiority in The Vikings—if it be a point of superiority—is purely technical. The action of the earlier play is concentrated and rounded. It has all the “unity,” or “unities,” that a rational criticism can possibly demand. In a word, it is, in form as well as essence, an ideal tragedy. The Pretenders, on the other hand, is a chronicle-play, far more close-knit than Shakespeare’s or Schiller’s works in that kind, but, nevertheless, what Aristotle would call “episodic” in its construction. The weaving of the plot, however, is quite masterly, betokening an effort of invention and adjustment incomparably greater than that which went to the making of The Vikings. It was doubtless his training in the school of French intrigue that enabled Ibsen to depict with such astonishing vigour that master wire-puller, Bishop Nicholas. This form of technical dexterity he was afterwards to outgrow and bring into disrepute. But from The Vikings to Pillars of Society he practised, whenever he was writing primarily for the stage, the methods of the “well-made play”; and in everything but concentration, which the very nature of the subject excluded, The Pretenders is thoroughly “well-made.”
With this play, though the Scandinavian criticism of 1864 seems to have been far from suspecting the fact, Ibsen took his place among the great dramatists of the world. In wealth of characterisation, complexity and nobility of emotion, and depth of spiritual insight, it stands high among the masterpieces of romantic drama. It would be hard to name a more vigorous character-projection than that of Bishop Nicholas, or any one dramatic invention more superbly inspired than the old man’s death scene, with the triumphant completion of his perpetuum mobile. But even if the Bishop were entirely omitted, the play would not be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The characters of Håkon and Skule, and the struggle between them, would still make one of the greatest historic dramas in literature.
It has not been generally noticed, I think, that Ibsen found in Björnson’s King Sverre, published in 1861, a study of Bishop Nicholas in his younger days. The play, as a whole, is a poor one, and does not appear in the collected edition of Björnson’s works; but there is distinct merit in the drawing of the Bishop’s character. Furthermore, it ought to be remembered that The Pretenders was not the first work, or even the first great work, of its class in Norwegian literature. In 1862, Björnson had published his splendid trilogy of Sigurd Slembe, which, though more fluid and uneven than The Pretenders, contains several passages of almost Shakespearean power. It was certainly greater than anything Ibsen had done up to that date. Ibsen reviewed it on its appearance, in terms of unmixed praise, yet, as one cannot but feel, rather over-cautiously.
If anything could excuse the coolness of Norwegian criticism towards The Pretenders, it was the great and flagrant artistic blemish of the Ghost Scene in the last act. This outburst of prophetico-topical satire is a sheer excrescence on the play, indefensible, but, at the same time, fortunately negligible. It is, however, of interest as a symptom of Ibsen’s mood in the last months before he left Norway, and also as one of the links in that chain which binds all his works together. Just as Skule’s attempt to plagiarise Håkon’s king’s-thought points backwards to Gunnar’s moral lapse in taking advantage of the fraud on Hiördis, so the ironic rhymes of the Bagler-Bishop’s ghost point forwards to the lyric indignation and irony of Brand and Peer Gynt.
W. A.
[1]. Though he himself wrote no more plays in the key of The Feast at Solhoug, the “accommodating prosody” of the ballads had doubtless its influence on the metres of Peer Gynt.
[2]. Correspondence, Letter 74.
[3]. The original title Kongsemnerne might be more literally translated “The Scions of Royalty.” It is rendered by Brandes in German “Königsmaterie,” or “the stuff from which kings are made.”