With Rosmersholm we reach the end of the series of social dramas which began seventeen years earlier with The League of Youth. In all these plays the individual is treated, more or less explicitly, as a social unit, a member of a class, an example of some collective characteristic, or a victim of some collective superstition, injustice or stupidity. The plays which follow, on the other hand, beginning with The Lady from the Sea, are plays of pure psychology. There are, no doubt, many women like Ellida Wangel or Hedda Gabler; but it is as individuals, not as members of a class, that they interest us; nor is their fate conditioned, like that of Nora or Mrs. Alving, by any social prejudice or pressure. But in Rosmersholm man is still considered as a “political animal.” The play, as we have seen, actually took its rise as a protest against a morbid condition of the Norwegian public mind, as observed by the poet at a particular point of time. George Brandes, indeed, has very justly contended that it ought to rank with An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck as a direct outcome of that momentous incident in Ibsen’s career, the fierce attack upon Ghosts. “Rosmer,” says Dr. Brandes, “begins where Stockmann left off. He wants to do from the very first what the doctor only wanted to do at the end of An Enemy of the People—to make proud, free, noble beings of his countrymen. At the beginning of the play, Rosmer is believed to be a decided Conservative (which the Norwegian considered Ibsen to be for many years after The League of Youth), and as long as this view is generally held, he is esteemed and admired, while everything that concerns him is interpreted in the most favourable manner. As soon, however, as his complete intellectual emancipation is discovered, and especially when it appears that he himself does not attempt to conceal the change in his views, public opinion turns against him.... Ibsen had been almost as much exposed as Rosmer to every sort of attack for some time after the publication of Ghosts, which (from the Conservative point of view) marked his conversion to Radicalism.” The analogy between Ibsen’s experience and Rosmer’s is far too striking not to have been present to the poet’s mind.
But, though the play distinctly belongs to the social series, it no less distinctly foreshadows the transition to the psychological series. Rosmer and Rebecca (or I am greatly mistaken) stand out from the social background much more clearly than their predecessors. They seem to grow away from it. At first they are concerned about political duties and social ideals; but, as the action proceeds, all these considerations drop away from them, or recur but as remembered dreams, and they are alone with their tortured souls. Then we cannot but note the intrusion of pure poetry—imagination scarcely deigning to allege a realistic pretext—in the personage of Ulric Brendel. He is of the same kindred as the Stranger in The Lady from the Sea, and the Rat-Wife in Little Eyolf. He marks Ibsen’s final rebellion against the prosaic restrictions which, from Pillars of Society onwards, he had striven to impose upon his genius.
He was yet to write plays more fascinating than Romersholm, but none greater in point of technical mastery. It surpasses The Wild Duck in the simplicity of its material, and in that concentration which renders its effect on the stage, perhaps, a little monotonous, and so detracts from its popularity. In construction it is a very marvel of cunning complexity. It is the consummate example in modern times of the retrospective method of which, in ancient times, the consummate example was the Œdipus Rex. This method has been blamed by many critics; but the first great critic of English drama commended it in the practice of the ancient poets. “They set the audience, as it were,” says Dryden, “at the post where the race is to be concluded.” “In unskilful hands,” I have said elsewhere, “the method might doubtless become very tedious; but when, as in Rosmersholm, every phase of the retrospect has a definite reaction upon the drama—the psychological process—actually passing on the stage, the effect attained is surely one of peculiar richness and depth. The drama of the past and the drama of the present are interwoven in such a complex yet clear and stately harmony as Ibsen himself has not often rivalled.”
THE LADY FROM THE SEA
INTRODUCTION
Ibsen’s birth-place, Skien, is not on the sea, but at the head of a long and very narrow fiord. At Grimstad, however, and again at Bergen, he had for years lived close to the skerry-bound coast. After he left Bergen, he seldom came in touch with the open sea. The upper part of Christiania Fiord is a mere salt-water lake; and in Germany he never saw the sea, in Italy only on brief visits to Ischia, Sorrento, Amalfi. We find him, in 1880,[[3]] writing to Hegel from Munich: “Of all that I miss down here, I miss the sea most. That is the deprivation to which I can least reconcile myself.”[myself.”] Again, in 1885, before the visit which he paid that year to Norway, he writes from Rome to the same correspondent, that he has visions of buying a country-house by the sea, in the neighbourhood of Christiania. “The sight of the sea,” he says, “is what I most miss in these regions; and this feeling grows year by year.” During the weeks he spent at Molde that year, there can be no doubt that he was gathering not only the political impressions which he used in Rosmersholm, but the impressions of ocean and fiord, and of the tide of European life flowing past, but not mingling with, the “carp-pond” existence of a small Norwegian town, which he was afterwards to embody in The Lady from the Sea. That invaluable bibliographer, Halvorsen, is almost certainly wrong in suggesting that Veblungsnes, at the head of the Romsdalfiord, is the scene of the play. The “local situation” is much more like that of Molde itself. There Ibsen must frequently have seen the great English tourist steamer gliding noiselessly to its moorings, before proceeding up the fiord to Veblungsnes, and then, on the following day, slipping out to sea again.
Two years later, in 1887, Ibsen spent the summer at Frederikshavn and at Sæby in the north of Jutland, not far from the Skaw. At Sæby I visited him; and from a letter written at the time I make the following extract: “He said that Fru Ibsen and he had first come to Frederikshavn, which he himself liked very much—he could knock about all day among the shipping, talking to the sailors, and so forth. Besides, he found the neighbourhood of the sea favourable to contemplation and constructive thought. Here, at Sæby, the sea was not so easily accessible. But Fru Ibsen didn’t like Frederikshavn because of the absence of pleasant walks about it; so Sæby was a sort of compromise between him and her.” I remember that he enlarged to me at great length on the fascination which the sea exercised over him. He was then, he said, “preparing some tomfoolery for next year.” On his return to Munich, he put his ideas into shape, and The Lady from the Sea was published in November 1888.
Ibsen wrote few letters while the play was in process of preparation, and none of them contains any noteworthy reference to it. On the other hand, we possess a very curious first draft of the story[[4]] (dated March 5, 1880), which shows in a most interesting fashion how an idea grew in his mind. Abbreviating freely, I will try to indicate the main points of difference between the sketch and the finished play.
The scene of the action was originally conceived as a much smaller town than it ultimately became, shut in and overshadowed by high, abrupt rocks. (Note that when he wrote the sketch Ibsen had not yet visited Molde.) There was to be an hotel and a sanatorium, and a good deal of summer gaiety in the place; but the people were to long in an impotent, will-less fashion for release from their imprisonment in the “shadow-life” of this remote corner of the world. Through the short summer, they were always to have the long winter impending over them; and this was to be a type of life: “A bright summer day with the great darkness behind it—that is all.” This motive, though traces of it remain, is much less emphasized than was at first intended.
The characters were to fall into three groups: inhabitants of the town, summer visitors, and passing tourists. The tourists were simply to “come and go, and enter episodically into the action”; but the other two groups are more or less individualised.
The first group is thus described: “The lawyer married a second time, to the woman from the open sea outside. Has two young but grown-up daughters by his first marriage. Elegant, distinguished, bitter. His past tarnished by an indiscretion. His career thereby cut short. The disreputable signboard-painter with the artist-dreams, happy in his imaginings. The old, married clerk. Has written a play in his youth, which was only once acted.[[5]] Is for ever touching it up, and lives in the illusion that it will be published and will make a great success. Takes no steps, however, to bring this about. Nevertheless, accounts himself one of the ‘literary’ class. His wife and children believe blindly in the play. (Perhaps a private tutor, not a clerk.) Tailor Fresvik, the man-midwife of radicalism, who shows his ‘emancipation’ in ludicrous attempts at debauchery—affairs with other men’s wives—talks of divorce and so forth.”