We see that, in the course of elaboration, not only the profession, but the character of Wangel was entirely altered. It is noteworthy, by the way, that, with Ibsen, lawyers are always more or less unsympathetic characters (Stensgård, Helmer, Krogstad, Brack) while doctors are more or less sympathetic (Fieldbo, Rank, Stockmann, Relling, Wangel, Herdal). We see, too, how he saved up for seventeen years the character of the clerk-dramatist. Found superfluous in The Lady from the Sea, he became the delightful Foldal of John Gabriel Borkman. The radical tailor was destined never to come to life; and the characteristics of the “signboard-painter” were divided between Ballested and Lyngstrand.
In the second group, however—that of the summer visitors—the consumptive sculptor Lyngstrand is already pretty completely sketched. The group was also to have included Lyngstrand’s “patron” and his patron’s wife—a “stupid, uppish, and tactless woman, who wounds the patient sometimes without meaning it, sometimes on purpose.” The patron’s wife has entirely disappeared from the completed play, while the patron, though mentioned, has not even a name.
But the oddest fact which this sketch brings to light is that Arnholm and the Stranger were formed by the scission, so to speak, of one character, denominated the “Strange Passenger.” Ellida[[6]] was originally to have been a pastor’s daughter. She was to have engaged herself secretly to a “young and unprincipled mate”—a midshipman dismissed the navy. This engagement she broke off, partly at her father’s command, partly of her own free will, because she could not forgive what she had learnt of the young sailor’s past. Then, after her marriage, she came to feel that in her ignorance and prejudice she had been too hard on him, and to believe that “essentially—in her imagination—it was with him that she had led her married life.” This is very like the feeling of Ellida in the play; but her story has become much more strange and romantic. It is not quite clear—the sketch being incomplete—whether the ex-midshipman was to have appeared in person. But there was to have been a “Strange Passenger” (so nicknamed by the other summer visitors) who had been in love with Ellida in the old days, and of whom she was now to make a confidant, very much as she does of Arnholm in the play. His character, however, was to have been quite unlike that of Arnholm; he was to have been “bitter, and given to cutting jests”—somewhat reminiscent, in fact, of the Strange Passenger in Peer Gynt. Ibsen may have meant that the nickname should be given him in allusion to that figure. We see, at any rate, that the Strange Passenger, in his capacity as Ellida’s confidant, became Arnholm, who is not in the least strange; while the strangeness was transferred to Ellida’s former lover, who, originally conceived as a comparatively commonplace personage, now became distinctively “the Stranger.”
Fragments of dialogue are roughly sketched—especially the young sculptor’s story of the shipwreck and of the group it has suggested to him. Ellida’s fancy that mankind has taken a wrong turning in developing into land-animals instead of water-animals is rather more carefully worked out in the sketch than in the play. It takes the form of a semi-serious biological theory, not attributed to any particular character: “Why should we belong to the dry land? Why not to the air? Why not to the sea? The common longing for wings—the strange dreams that one can fly, and that one does fly without feeling the least surprise at the fact—how is all this to be explained?” The suggestion evidently is that these dreams are reminiscences of the bird stage in our development; and then the poet goes on to suggest the same explanation of the intense longing for the sea which he attributes to Ellida: “People who are akin to the sea. Bound to the sea. Dependent on the sea. Must get back to it. A fish-species forms the primordial link in the evolutionary chain. Do rudiments of it survive in our nature? In the nature of some of us?” He also indicates a fantasy of floating cities to be towed southwards or northwards according to the season. “To learn to control storms and the weather. Some such glorious time will come. And we—we shall not be there to see it.” All this over-luxuriant growth of fantasy has been carefully pruned in the completed play.
The main incidents of the first act are sketched out in a form not very different from that which they ultimately assumed—and there the scenario breaks off.
“The Stranger’s dæmonic power over Ellida was suggested,” says John Paulsen, “by Welhaven’s strange influence over Camilla Wergeland;” while Dr. Brahm asserts “on credible authority” that the incident of the rings thrown into the sea reproduces an episode of Ibsen’s own early life in Bergen. Until the “credible authority” is more clearly specified, we need not pin our faith to the latter assertion; but the former receives some confirmation in a letter which Ibsen addressed on May 3, 1889, to the lady whom Paulsen mentions. This was Camilla Collett, born Wergeland, a sister of the great lyric poet, Henrik Wergeland, and the authoress of a book, From the Camp of the Dumb (1877), which is said to have greatly influenced Ibsen’s attitude towards the woman-question, and to have stimulated him to the production of A Doll’s House. I do not know the story of her relation to J. S. C. Welhaven, a distinguished poet, and her brother’s chief rival; but it is clear from Ibsen’s letter that she was in some way present to his mind during the composition of The Lady from the Sea. This is what he wrote: “Allow me to send you a few words of very sincere thanks for your comprehension of The Lady from the Sea. I felt pretty sure in advance that from you more than any one else I could rely upon such comprehension; but it gave me inexpressible pleasure to find my hope confirmed by your letter. Yes, there are points of resemblance—indeed many. And you have seen and felt them—points, I mean, which I could arrive at only by divination. But it is now many years since you, in virtue of your spiritual development, began, in one form or another, to make your presence felt in my work.” Camilla Collett died in 1895, at the age of eighty-two.
Nowhere has The Lady from the Sea proved one of Ibsen’s most popular works. It was acted in all the Scandinavian capitals, and in several German cities, in February and March 1889. The poet himself was present at the first performance at the Royal Theatre, Berlin, on March 4, and afterwards (March 14) at a performance at Weimar, where he was called before the curtain after each act, and received a laurel wreath. In a letter to Hoffory, he expressed himself delighted with the actor who played the Stranger at Weimar; “I could not desire, and could scarcely conceive, a better embodiment of the part—a long gaunt figure, with hawk-like features, piercing black eyes, and a fine, deep, veiled voice.” The play holds the stage here and there in Germany, but is not very frequently acted.
In London, five performances of Mrs. Marx-Aveling’s translation were given, under the direction of Dr. Aveling, at Terry’s Theatre in May 1891—the year of the first performance in England of Ghosts, Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler. This wholly inadequate production was followed, eleven years later, by a revival at the Royalty Theatre, by the Stage Society, in which Ellida was played by Miss Janet Achurch, and the Stranger by Mr. Laurence Irving. In Paris, an organisation calling itself “Les Escholiers,” produced La Dame de la Mer in 1892. It was afterwards played, both in Paris and on tour, by the Théâtre de l’Œuvre. I find no record of performances in other countries.
The discovery that The Lady from the Sea was planned so early as 1880 is particularly interesting in view of the fact that, in technical concentration, and even, one is inclined to say, in intellectual power, it falls notably below the level of its immediate predecessors, The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm, and its immediate successors, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder. It would scarcely be going too far to call it the weakest thing Ibsen produced between A Doll’s House and John Gabriel Borkman, both inclusive. I well remember the sense of slackening dramatic fibre with which I read it on its first appearance; the fear that age was beginning to tell upon the poet; and the relief with which I found him, in Hedda Gabler, once more at the very height of his power. Some readers may take exception to this view, and declare that they prefer The Lady from the Sea to several of the plays which I would rank above it. In point of amenity and charm, it doubtless ranks high among Ibsen’s works; its poetic merits are great; but the comparative laxity of its technique seems to me quite unmistakable. The main interest—the Ellida-Wangel interest, let us call it—is constantly being interrupted by two subsidiary interests: the Arnholm-Boletta interest, and the Boletta-Hilda-Lyngstrand interest. These lines of interest touch each other, but are not effectually interwoven. In no other play of Ibsen’s, in fact, since The League of Youth, is there such a marked sub-plot, or, rather, two sub-plots; and, for my part, judging them by the high Ibsen standard, I find neither of these sub-plots particularly interesting. The main action, on the other hand, is not only interesting but full of psychological truth. Ellida is one of the most living of Ibsen’s women. There are few of his heroines whom one has not seen and recognised in real life; but Ellida in particular I happen to have known intimately, though Ibsen never heard of the lady in question. The character of Wangel, too, is not only very amiable, but very closely observed. Yet even in the working out of this main theme, there is, I think, a technical weakness. We feel that, in the decisive scene of the last act, Wangel’s mere statement that he sets Ellida free is an insufficient pivot for the revolution which takes place in her mind. Psychologically, no doubt, it is adequate, but dramatically it is ineffective. The poet ought, I suggest, to have devised some more convincing means of bringing home both to her and to us the fact of her manumission. In default of a practical proof, a symbolic indication might have served; but something we want beyond a mere verbal declaration. It may be taken as a technical principle, I believe, that a change of mind on which so much depends ought, for purposes of dramatic effect, to be demonstrated by some outward and visible sign sufficiently cogent to make the audience fully realise and believe in it.
Another technical weakness, more obvious, though perhaps less important, is the astounding coincidence by which Lyngstrand, the one witness to the Stranger’s frenzy on reading of Ellida’s faithlessness, is made, by pure chance, to encounter Ellida and to tell her the story.[[7]] This is, I think, the only real abuse of coincidence in Ibsen’s modern plays, from Pillars of Society onwards. One or two other much slighter coincidences—such as, in A Doll’s House, Mrs. Linden’s former acquaintance with Krogstad—are accounted for by the fact that Norway is a very small country, in which, roughly speaking, every one of the town-dwelling upper and middle class knows, or has heard of, every one else.