Of all Ibsen’s plays, An Enemy of the People is the least poetical, the least imaginative, the one which makes least appeal to our sensibilities. Even in The League of Youth there is a touch of poetic fancy in the character of Selma; while Pillars of Society is sentimentally conceived throughout, and possesses in Martha a figure of great, though somewhat conventional, pathos. In this play, on the other hand, there is no appeal either to the imagination or to the tender emotions. It is a straightforward satiric comedy, dealing exclusively with the everyday prose of life. We have only to compare it with its immediate predecessor, Ghosts, and its immediate successor, The Wild Duck, to feel how absolutely different is the imaginative effort involved in it. Realising this, we no longer wonder that the poet should have thrown it off in half the time he usually required to mature and execute one of his creations.
Yet An Enemy of the People takes a high place in the second rank of the Ibsen works, in virtue of its buoyant vitality, its great technical excellence, and the geniality of its humour. It seems odd, at first sight, that a distinctly polemical play, which took its rise in a mood of exasperation, should be perhaps the most amiable of all the poet’s productions. But the reason is fairly obvious. Ibsen’s nature was far too complex, and far too specifically dramatic, to permit of his giving anything like direct expression to a personal mood. The very fact that Dr. Stockmann was to utter much of his own indignation and many of his own ideas forced him to make the worthy Doctor in temperament and manner as unlike himself as possible. Now boisterous geniality, loquacity, irrepressible rashness of utterance, and a total absence of self-criticism and self-irony were the very contradiction of the poet’s own characteristics—at any rate, after he had entered upon middle life. He doubtless looked round for models who should be his own antipodes in these respects. John Paulsen, as we have seen, thinks that he took many traits from Jonas Lie; others say[[2]] that one of his chief models was an old friend named Harald Thaulow, the father of the great painter. Be this as it may, the very effort to disguise himself naturally led him to attribute to his protagonist and mouthpiece a great superficial amiability. I am far from implying that Ibsen’s own character was essentially unamiable; it would ill become one whom he always treated with the utmost kindness to say or think anything of the kind. But his amiability was not superficial, effusive, exuberant; it seldom reached that boiling-point which we call geniality; and for that very reason Thomas Stockmann became the most genial of his characters. He may be called Ibsen’s Colonel Newcome. We have seen from the letter to Hegel (p. x.) that the poet regarded him with much the same ironic affection which Thackeray must have felt for that other Thomas who, amid many differences, had the same simple-minded, large-hearted, child-like nature.
In technical quality, An Enemy of the People is wholly admirable. We have only to compare it with Pillars of Society, the last play in which Ibsen had painted a broad satiric picture of the life of a Norwegian town, to feel how great an advance he had made in the intervening five years. In naturalness of exposition, suppleness of development, and what may be called general untheatricality of treatment, the later play has every possible advantage over the earlier. In one point only can it be said that Ibsen has allowed a touch of artificiality to creep in. In order to render the peripety of the third act more striking, he has made Hovstad, Billing, and Aslaksen, in the earlier scenes, unnaturally inapprehensive of the sacrifices implied in Stockmann’s scheme of reform. It is scarcely credible that they should be so free and emphatic in their offers of support to the Doctor’s agitation, before they have made the smallest inquiry as to what it is likely to cost the town. They think, it may be said, that the shareholders of the Baths will have to bear the whole expense; but surely some misgivings could not but cross their minds as to whether the shareholders would be prepared to do so.
THE WILD DUCK.
INTRODUCTION.
The first mention of The Wild Duck (as yet unnamed) occurs in a letter from Ibsen to George Brandes, dated Rome, June 12, 1883, some six months after the appearance of An Enemy of the People. “I am revolving in my mind just now,” he says, “the plan of a new dramatic work in four acts. From time to time a variety of whimsies gathers in one’s mind, and one wants to find an outlet for them. But as the play will neither deal with the Supreme Court nor with the Absolute Veto, nor even with the Pure Flag, it can hardly count upon attracting much attention in Norway. Let us hope, however, that it may find a hearing elsewhere.” The allusion in this passage is to the great constitutional struggle of 1880-84, of which some account will have to be given in the Introduction to Rosmersholm. The “Pure Flag” agitation aimed at, and obtained, the exclusion from the Norwegian flag of the mark of union with Sweden, and was thus a preliminary step towards the severance of the two kingdoms. The word which I have translated “whimsies” is in the original galskaber, which might be literally rendered “mad fancies” or “crazy notions.” This word, or galskab in the singular, was Ibsen’s favourite term for his conceptions as they grew up in his mind. I well remember his saying to me, while he was engaged on The Lady from the Sea, “I hope to have some tomfoolery [galskab] ready for next year.” Sometimes he would vary the expression and say djœvelskab, or “devilry.”
Of this particular “tomfoolery” we hear no more for a full year. Then, at the end of June 1884, he writes in almost identical terms to Brandes and to Theodor Caspari, announcing its completion in the rough. His letter to Caspari is dated Rome, June 27. “All last winter,” he says, “I have been pondering over some new whimsies, and have wrestled with them till at last they took dramatic form in a five-act play which I have just completed. That is to say, I have completed the rough draft of it. Now comes the more delicate elaboration, the more energetic individualisation of the characters and their methods of expression. In order to find the requisite quiet and solitude for this work, I am going in a few days to Gossensass, in the Tyrol.” This little glimpse into his workshop is particularly interesting.
From Gossensass he wrote to Hegel on September 2: “Herewith I send you the manuscript of my new play, The Wild Duck, which has occupied me daily for the past four months, and from which I cannot part without a sense of regret. The characters in this play, despite their many frailties, have, in the course of our long daily association, endeared themselves to me. However, I hope they will also find good and kind friends among the great reading public, and not least among the player-folk, to whom they all, without exception, offer problems worth the solving. But the study and presentation of these personages will not be easy.... This new play in some ways occupies a place apart among my dramatic productions; its method of development [literally, of advance] is in many respects divergent from that of its predecessors. But for the present I shall say no more on this subject. The critics will no doubt discover the points in question; at all events, they will find a good deal to wrangle about, a good deal to interpret. Moreover, I think The Wild Duck may perhaps lure some of our younger dramatists into new paths, and this I hold to be desirable.”
The play was published on November 11, 1884, and was acted at all the leading theatres of Scandinavia in January or February 1885. Ibsen’s estimate of its acting value was fully justified. It everywhere proved itself immensely effective on the stage, and Hialmar, Gina, and Hedvig have made, or greatly enhanced, the reputation of many an actor and actress. Hialmar was one of the chief successes of Emil Poulsen, the leading Danish actor of his day, who placed the second act of The Wild Duck in the programme of his farewell performance. It took more than three years for the play to reach the German stage. It was first acted in Berlin in March 1888; but thereafter it rapidly spread throughout Germany and Austria, and everywhere took firm hold. It was on several occasions, and in various cities, selected for performance in Ibsen’s presence, as representing the best that the local theatre could do. In Paris it was produced at the Théâtre Libre in 1891, and was pronounced by Francisque Sarcey to be “obscure, incoherent, insupportable,” but nevertheless to leave “a profound impression.” In London it was first produced by the Independent Theatre Society on May 4, 1894, Mr. W. L. Abingdon playing Hialmar, and Miss Winifred Fraser giving a delightful performance of Hedvig. The late Clement Scott’s pronouncement on it was that “to make a fuss about so feeble a production was to insult dramatic literature and to outrage common sense.” It was repeated at the Globe Theatre in May 1897, with Mr. Laurence Irving as Hialmar and Miss Fraser again as Hedvig. In October 1905 it was revived at the Court Theatre, with Mr. Granville Barker as Hialmar and Miss Dorothy Minto as Hedvig. Of American performances I find no record. It has been acted in Italy and in Greece, I know not with what success. The fact that it has no part for a “leading lady” has rendered it less of an international stock-piece than A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, or even Rosmersholm.
There can be no doubt that The Wild Duck marks a reaction in the poet’s mood, following upon the eager vivacity wherewith, in An Enemy of the People, he had flung his defiance at the “compact Liberal majority,” which, as the reception of Ghosts had proved, could not endure to be told the truth. Having said his say and liberated his soul, he now began to ask himself whether human nature was, after all, capable of assimilating the strong meat of truth—whether illusion might not be, for the average man, the only thing that could make life livable. It would be too much to say that the play gives a generally affirmative answer to this question. On the contrary, its last lines express pretty clearly the poet’s firm conviction that if life cannot reconcile itself with truth, then life may as well go to the wall. Nevertheless his very devotion to truth forces him to realise and admit that it is an antitoxin which, rashly injected at wrong times or in wrong doses, may produce disastrous results. It ought not to be indiscriminately administered by “quacksalvers.”
Gregers Werle is unquestionably a piece of ironic self-portraiture. In his habit of “pestering people, in their poverty, with the claim of the ideal,” the poet adumbrates his own conduct from Brand onwards, but especially in Ghosts and An Enemy of the People. Relling, again, is an embodiment of the mood which was dominant during the conception of the play—the mood of pitying contempt for that poor thing human nature, as embodied in Hialmar. An actor who, in playing the part of Relling, made up as Ibsen himself, has been blamed for having committed a fault not only of taste, but of interpretation, since Gregers (it is maintained) is the true Ibsen. But the fact is that both characters represent the poet. They embody the struggle in his mind between idealism and cynical despondency. There can be no doubt, however, that in some measure he consciously identified himself with Gregers. In a letter to Mr. Gosse, written in 1872, he had employed in his own person the very phrase, den ideale fordring—“the claim of the ideal”—which is Gregers' watchword. The use of this sufficiently obvious phrase, however, does not mean much. Far stronger evidence of identification is afforded by John Paulsen[[3]] in some anecdotes he relates of Ibsen’s habits of “self-help”—evidence which we may all the more safely accept, as Herr Paulsen seems to have been unconscious of its bearing upon the character of Gregers. “Ibsen,” he says, “was always bent upon doing things himself, so as not to give trouble to servants. His ideal was ‘the self-made man.’[[4]] Thus, if a button came off one of his garments he would retire to his own room, lock the door, and, after many comical and unnecessary preliminaries, proceed to sew on the button himself, with the same care with which he wrote the fair copy of a new play. Such an important task he could not possibly entrust to any one else, not even to his wife. One of his paradoxes was that ‘a woman never knew how to sew on a button so that it would hold.’ But if he himself sewed it on, it held to all eternity. Fru Ibsen smiled roguishly and subtly when the creator of Nora came out with such anti-feminist sentiments. Afterwards she told me in confidence, 'It is true that Ibsen himself sews on his vagrant buttons; but the fact that they hold so well is my doing, for, without his knowledge, I always ‘finish them off,’ which he forgets to do. But don’t disturb his conviction: it makes him so happy.'”