“One winter day in Munich,” Herr Paulsen continues, “Ibsen asked me with a serious and even anxious countenance, ‘Tell me one thing, Paulsen—do you black your own boots every morning?’ I was taken aback, and doubtless looked quite guilty as I answered, ‘No.’ I had a vaguely uncomfortable sense that I had failed in a duty to myself and to society. ‘But[‘But] you really ought to do so. It will make you feel a different man. One should never let others do what one can do oneself. If you begin with blacking your boots, you will get on to putting your room in order, laying the fire, etc. In this way you will at last find yourself an emancipated man, independent of Tom, Dick, or Harry.’ I promised to follow his advice, but have unfortunately not kept my word.” It is evident that Ibsen purposely transferred to Gregers this characteristic of his own; and the sentiments with which Gina regards it are probably not unlike those which Fru Ibsen may from time to time have manifested. We could scarcely demand clearer proof that in Gregers the poet was laughing at himself.
To Hedvig, Ibsen gave the name of his only sister,[sister,] and in many respects she seems to have served as a model for the character. She was the poet’s favourite among all his relatives. “You are certainly the best of us,” he wrote to her in 1869. Björnstjerne Björnson said, after making her acquaintance, that he now understood what a large element of heredity there was in Ibsen’s bent towards mysticism. We may be sure that Hedvig’s researches among the books left by the old sea-captain, and her dislike for the frontispiece of Harrison’s History of London, are remembered traits from the home-life of the poet’s childhood. It does not seem to be known who had the honour of “sitting for” the character of Hialmar. Probably he is a composite of many originals. Moreover, he is obviously a younger brother of Peer Gynt. Deprive Peer Gynt of his sense of humour, and clip the wings of his imagination, and you have Hialmar Ekdal.
I confess I do not know quite definitely what Ibsen had in mind when he spoke of The Wild Duck holding “a place apart” among his productions and exemplifying a technique (for he is evidently thinking of its technical development) “divergent” from that of its predecessors. I should rather say that it marked the continuation and consummation of the technical method which he had been elaborating from Pillars of Society onward. It is the first example of what we may term his retrospective method, in its full complexity. Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House may be called semi-retrospective; something like half of the essential action takes place before the eyes of the audience. Ghosts is almost wholly retrospective; as soon as the past has been fully unravelled, the action is over, and only the catastrophe remains; but in this case the past to be unravelled is comparatively simple and easy of disentanglement. An Enemy of the People is scarcely retrospective at all; almost the whole of its action falls within the frame of the picture. In The Wild Duck, on the other hand, the unravelling of the past is a task of infinite subtlety and elaborate art. The execution of this task shows a marvellous and hitherto unexampled grasp of mind. Never before, certainly, had the poet displayed such an amazing power of fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil after veil from the past; and as every event was also a trait of character, it followed that never before had his dialogue been so saturated, as it were, with character-revelation. The development of the drama reminds one of the practice (in itself a very bad practice) of certain modern stage-managers, who are fond of raising their curtain on a dark scene, and then gradually lighting it up by a series of touches on the electric switchboard. First there comes a glimmer from the right, then a flash from the left; then the background is suffused with light, so that we see objects standing out against it in profile, but cannot as yet discern their details. Then comes a ray from this batten, a gleam from that; here a penetrating shaft of light, there a lambent glow; until at last the footlights are turned on at full, and every nook and cranny of the scene stands revealed in a blaze of luminosity. But Ibsen’s switchboard is far more subtly subdivided than that of even the most modern theatre. At every touch upon it, some single, cunningly-placed, ingeniously-dissembled burner kindles, almost unnoticed save by the most watchful eye; so that the full light spreads over the scene as imperceptibly as dawn grows into day.
It seems to me, then, that The Wild Duck is a consummation rather than a new departure. Assuredly it marks the summit of the poet’s achievement (in modern prose) up to that date. Its only possible rival is Ghosts; and who does not feel the greater richness, depth, suppleness, and variety of the later play? It gives us, in a word, a larger segment of life.
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
(1882)
CHARACTERS.
- Doctor Thomas Stockmann, medical officer of the Baths.
- Mrs. Stockmann, his wife.
- Petra, their daughter, a teacher.
- Eilif
Petra }their sons, thirteen and ten years old respectively - Peter Stockmann, the doctor’s elder brother, Burgomaster[[5]] and chief of police, chairman of the Baths Committee, etc.
- Morten Kiil,[[6]] master tanner, Mrs. Stockmann’s adoptive-father.
- Hovstad, editor of the “People’s Messenger.”
- Billing, on the staff of the paper.
- Horster, a ship’s captain.
- Aslaksen, a printer.
Participants in a meeting of citizens: all sorts and conditions of men, some women, and a band of schoolboys.
The action passes in a town on the South Coast of Norway.