| PAGE | |
| Introduction to “An Enemy of the People” | [vii] |
| Introduction to “The Wild Duck” | [xvii] |
| “An Enemy of the People” | [1] |
| Translated by Mrs. Eleanor Marx-Aveling | |
| “The Wild Duck” | [189] |
| Translated by Mrs. Frances E. Archer |
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.
INTRODUCTION.
From Pillars of Society to John Gabriel Borkman, all Ibsen’s plays, with one exception, succeeded each other at intervals of two years. The single exception was An Enemy of the People. The storm of obloquy which greeted Ghosts stirred him to unwonted rapidity of production. Ghosts had appeared in December 1881; already, in the spring of 1882, Ibsen, then living in Rome, was at work upon its successor; and he finished it at Gossensass, in the Tyrol, in the early autumn. It appeared in Copenhagen at the end of November.
John Paulsen[[1]] relates an anecdote of the poet’s extreme secretiveness during the process of composition, which may find a place here: “One summer he was travelling by rail with his wife and son. He was engaged upon a new play at the time; but neither Fru Ibsen nor Sigurd had any idea as to what it was about. Of course they were both very curious. It happened that, at a station, Ibsen left the carriage for a few moments. As he did so he dropped a scrap of paper. His wife picked it up, and read on it only the words, ‘The doctor says....’ Nothing more. Fru Ibsen showed it laughingly to Sigurd, and said, ‘Now we will tease your father a little when he comes back. He will be horrified to find that we know anything of his play.’ When Ibsen entered the carriage his wife looked at him roguishly, and said, ‘What doctor is it that figures in your new piece? I am sure he must have many interesting things to say.’ But if she could have foreseen the effect of her innocent jest, Fru Ibsen would certainly have held her tongue. For Ibsen was speechless with surprise and rage. When at last he recovered his speech, it was to utter a torrent of reproaches. What did this mean? Was he not safe in his own house? Was he surrounded with spies? Had his locks been tampered with, his desk rifled? And so forth, and so forth. His wife, who had listened with a quiet smile to the rising tempest of his wrath, at last handed him the scrap of paper. ‘We know nothing more than what is written upon this slip which you let fall. Allow me to return it to you.’ There stood Ibsen crestfallen. All his suspicions had vanished into thin air. The play on which he was occupied proved to be An Enemy of the People, and the doctor was none other than our old friend Stockmann, the good-hearted and muddleheaded reformer, for whom Jonas Lie partly served as a model.”
The indignation which glows in An Enemy of the People was kindled, in the main, by the attitude adopted towards Ghosts by the Norwegian Liberal press and the “compact majority” it represented. But the image on which the play rings the changes was present to the poet’s long before Ghosts was written. On December 19, 1879—a fortnight after the publication of A Doll’s House—Ibsen wrote to Professor Dietrichson: “It appears to me doubtful whether better artistic conditions can be attained in Norway before the intellectual soil has been thoroughly turned up and cleansed, and all the swamps drained off.” Here we have clearly the germ of An Enemy of the People. The image so took hold of Ibsen that after applying it to social life in this play, he recurred to it in The Wild Duck, in relation to the individual life.
The mood to which we definitely owe An Enemy of the People appears very clearly in a letter to George Brandes, dated January 3, 1882, in which Ibsen thanks him for his criticism of Ghosts. “What are we to say,” he proceeds, “of the attitude taken up by the so-called Liberal press—by those leaders who speak and write about freedom of action and thought, and at the same time make themselves the slaves of the supposed opinions of their subscribers? I am more and more confirmed in my belief that there is something demoralising in engaging in politics and joining parties. I, at any rate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on its side. Björnson says, ‘The majority is always right’; and as a practical politician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, of necessity say, ‘The minority is always right.’ Naturally I am not thinking of that minority of stagnationists who are left behind by the great middle party, which with us is called Liberal; I mean that minority which leads the van, and pushes on to points which the majority has not yet reached. I hold that that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.”
The same letter closes with a passage which foreshadows not only An Enemy of the People, but Rosmersholm: “When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general intelligence is at home, when I notice the low standard by which everything is judged, a deep despondency comes over me, and it often seems to me that I might just as well end my literary activity at once. They really do not need poetry at home; they get along so well with the Parliamentary News and the Lutheran Weekly. And then they have their party papers. I have not the gifts that go to make a good citizen, nor yet the gift of orthodoxy; and what I possess no gift for I keep out of. Liberty is the first and highest condition for me. At home they do not trouble much about liberty, but only about liberties: a few more or a few less, according to the standpoint of their party. I feel, too, most painfully affected by the crudity, the plebeian element, in all our public discussion. The very praiseworthy attempt to make of our people a democratic community has inadvertently gone a good way towards making us a plebeian community. Distinction of soul seems to be on the decline at home.”
So early as March 16, 1882, Ibsen announces to his publisher that he is “fully occupied with preparations for a new play.” “This time,” he says, “it will be a peaceable production which can be read by Ministers of State and wholesale merchants and their ladies, and from which the theatres will not be obliged to recoil. Its execution will come very easy to me, and I shall do my best to have it ready pretty early in the autumn.” In this he was successful. From Gossensass, on September 9, he wrote to Hegel: “I have the pleasure of sending you herewith the remainder of the manuscript of my new play. I have enjoyed writing this piece, and I feel quite lost and lonely now that it is out of hand. Dr. Stockmann and I got on excellently together; we agree on so many subjects. But the Doctor is a more muddleheaded person than I am, and he has, moreover, several other characteristics because of which people will stand hearing a good many things from him which they might perhaps not have taken in such very good part had they been said by me.”
A letter to Brandes, written six months after the appearance of the play (June 12, 1883), answers some objection which the critic seems to have made—of what nature we can only guess: “As to An Enemy of the People, if we had a chance to discuss it I think we should come to a tolerable agreement. You are, of course right in urging that we must all work for the spread of our opinions. But I maintain that a fighter at the intellectual outposts can never gather a majority around him. In ten years, perhaps, the majority may occupy the standpoint which Dr. Stockmann held at the public meeting. But during these ten years the Doctor will not have been standing still; he will still be at least ten years ahead of the majority. The majority, the mass, the multitude, can never overtake him; he can never have the majority with him. As for myself, at all events, I am conscious of this incessant progression. At the point where I stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a fairly compact multitude; but I myself am there no longer; I am elsewhere, and, I hope, further ahead.” This is a fine saying, and as just as it is fine, with respect to the series of social plays, down to, and including, Rosmersholm. To the psychological series, which begins with The Lady from the Sea, this law of progression scarcely applies. The standpoint in each is different; but the movement is not so much one of intellectual advance as of deepening spiritual insight.
As Ibsen predicted, the Scandinavian theatres seized with avidity upon An Enemy of the People. Between January and March 1883 it was produced in Christiania, Bergen, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. It has always been very popular on the stage, and was the play chosen to represent Ibsen in the series of festival performances which inaugurated the National Theatre at Christiania. The first evening, September 1, 1899, was devoted to Holberg, the great founder of Norwegian-Danish drama; An Enemy of the People followed on September 2; and on September 3 Björnson held the stage, with Sigurd Jorsalfar. Oddly enough, Ein Volksfeind was four years old[years old] before it found its way to the German stage. It was first produced in Berlin, March 5, 1887, and has since then been very popular throughout Germany. It has even been presented at the Court Theatres of Berlin and Vienna—a fact which seems remarkable when we note that in France and Spain it has been pressed into the service of anarchism, as a revolutionary manifesto. When first produced in Paris in 1895, and again in 1899, it was made the occasion of anarchist demonstrations. It was the play chosen for representation in Paris on Ibsen’s seventieth birthday, March 29, 1898. In England it was first produced by Mr. Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre on the afternoon of June 14, 1893. Mr. Tree has repeated his performance of Stockmann a good many times in London, the provinces, and America. He revived the play at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1905. Mr. Louis Calvert played Stockmann at the Gentleman’s Concert Hall in Manchester, January 27, 1894. I can find no record of any performances of the play in America, save German performances and those given by Mr. Tree; but it seems incredible that no American actor should have been attracted by the part of Stockmann. Een Vijand des Volks was produced in Holland in 1884, before it had even been seen in Germany; and in Italy, Un Nemico del Popolo holds a place in the repertory of the distinguished actor Ermete Novelli.