We have seen that Ibsen offended by his disregard of academic dramatic attitudes. His personages are ordinary, yet like Browning's meanest soul they have a human side to show us. The inherent stuff of his plays is tragic; but the hero and heroine do not stamp, stalk, or spout blank verse; it is the tragedy of life without the sop of sentiment usually administered by second-rate poets. Missing the colour and decoration, the pretty music, and the eternal simper of the sensual, we naturally turn our back on such a writer. If he knows souls, he certainly does not understand the box-office. This for the negative side. On the positive, the apparent baldness of the narrative, the ugliness of his men and women, their utterance of ideas foreign to cramped, convention-ridden lives, mortify us immeasurably. The tale always ends badly or sadly. And when one of his characters begins to talk about the "joy of life," it is the gloom of life that is evoked. The women—and here is the shock to our masculine vanity—the women assert themselves too much, telling men that they are not what they believe themselves to be. Lastly, the form of the Ibsen play is compact with ideas and emotion. We usually don't go to the theatre to think or to feel. With Ibsen we must think, and think closely; we must feel—worse still, be thrilled to our marrow by the spectacle of our own spiritual skeletons. No marvellous music is there to heal the wounded nerves as in Tristan and Isolde; no prophylactic for the merciless acid of the dissector. We either breathe a rarefied atmosphere in his Brand and in When We Dead Awake, or else, in the social drama, the air is so dense with the intensity of the closely wrought moods that we gasp as if in the chamber of a diving-bell. Human, all too human!
Protean in his mental and spiritual activities, a hater of shams—religious, political, and social shams—more symbolist than realist, in assent with Goethe that no material is unfit for poetic treatment, the substance of Ibsen's morality consists in his declaration that men to be free must first free themselves. Once, in addressing a group of Norwegian workmen, he told them that man must ennoble himself, he must will himself free; "to will is to have to will," as he says in Emperor and Galilean. Yet in Peer Gynt he declares "to be oneself is to slay oneself." Surely all this is not very radical. He wrote to Georg Brandes, that the State was the foe of the individual; therefore the State must go. But the revolution must be one of the spirit. Ibsen ever despised socialism, and after his mortification over the fiasco of the Paris Commune he had never a good word for that vain legend: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Brandes relates that while Ibsen wished—in one of his poems—to place a torpedo under the social ark, there was also a time when he longed to use the knout on the willing slaves of a despised social system.
Perhaps the main cause of Ibsen's offending is his irony. The world forgives much, irony never, for irony is the ivory tower of the intellectual, the last refuge of the original. It is not the intellectual irony of Meredith, nor the playful irony of Anatole France, but a veiled corrosive irony that causes you to tread suspiciously every yard of his dramatic domain. The "second intention," the secondary dialogue, spoken of by Maeterlinck, in the Ibsen plays is very disconcerting to those who prefer their drama free from enigma. Otherwise his dialogue is a model for future dramatists. It is clarity itself and, closely woven, it has the characteristic accents of nature. Read, we feel its gripping logic; spoken by an actor, it tingles with vitality.
For the student there is a fascination in the cohesiveness of these dramas. Ibsen's mind was like a lens; it focussed the refracted, scattered, and broken lights of opinions and theories of his day upon the contracted space of his stage. In a fluid state the ideas that crystallised in his prose series are to be found in his earliest work; there is a remorseless fastening of link to link in the march-like movement of his plays. Their author seems to delight in battering down in Ghosts what he had preached in A Doll's House; The Enemy of the People exalted the individual man, though Ghosts taught that a certain kind of personal liberty is deadly; The Wild Duck, which follows, is another puzzle, for in it the misguided idealist is pilloried for destroying homes by his truth-telling, dangerous tongue; Rosmersholm follows with its portrayal of lonely souls; and the danger of filling old bottles with the fermenting wines of new ideas is set forth; in The Lady from the Sea free-will, the will to love, is lauded, though Rebekka West and Rosmersholm perished because of their exercise of this same will; Hedda Gabler shows the converse of Ellida Wangel's "will to power." Hedda is a creature wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns us again, for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead your own life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it leads to a catastrophe which wrecks a household. This game of contradiction is continued in The Master-Builder, a most potent exposition of human motives. Solness is sick-brained because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, the "younger generation," a Hedda Gabler à rebours, that he so feared would come knocking at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, arouses his slumbering self; curiously enough, if the ordinary standards of success be adduced, he goes to his destruction when he again climbs the dizzy spire. In John Gabriel Borkman the allegory is clearer. Sacrificing love to a base ambition, to "commercialism," Borkman at the close of his great and miserable life discovers that he has committed the one unpardonable offence: he has slain the love-life in the woman he loved, and for the sake of gold. So he is a failure, and, like Peer Gynt, he is ready for the Button-Moulder with his refuse-heap, who lies in wait for all cowardly and incomplete souls. The Epilogue returns to the mountains, the Ibsen symbol of freedom, and there we learn for the last time that love is greater than art, that love is life. And the dead of life awake.
The immorality of these plays is so well concealed that only abnormal moralists detect it. It may be admitted that Ibsen, like Shakespeare, manifests a preference for the man who fails. What is new is the art with which this idea is developed. The Ibsen play begins where other plays end. The form is the "amplified catastrophe" of Sophocles. After marriage the curtain is rung up on the true drama of life, therefore marriage is a theme which constantly preoccupies this modern poet. He regards it from all sides, asking whether "by self-surrender, self-realisation may be achieved." His speech delivered once before a ladies' club at Christiania proves that he is not a champion of latter-day woman's rights. "The women will solve the question of mankind, but they must do so as mothers." Yet Nora Helmer, when she slammed the door of her doll's home, caused an echo in the heart of every intelligent woman in Christendom. It is not necessary now to ask whether a woman would, or should, desert her children; Nora's departure was only the symbol of her liberty, the gesture of a newly awakened individuality. Ibsen did not preach—as innocent persons of both sexes and all anti-Ibsenites believe—that woman should throw overboard her duties; this is an absurd construction. As well argue that the example of Othello must set jealous husbands smothering their wives. A Doll's House enacted has caused no more evil than Othello. It was the plea for woman as a human being, neither more nor less than man, which the dramatist made. Our withers must have been well wrung, for it aroused a whirlwind of wrath, and henceforth the house-key became the symbol of feminine supremacy. Yet in his lovely drama of pity and resignation, Little Eyolf, the tenderest from his pen, the poet set up a counter-figure to Nora, demonstrating the duties parents owe their children.
Without exaggeration, he may be said to have discovered for the stage the modern woman. No longer the sleek cat of the drawing-room, or the bayadere of luxury, or the wild outlaw of society, the "emancipated" Ibsen woman is the sensible woman, the womanly woman, bearing a not remote resemblance to the old-fashioned woman, who calmly accepts her share of the burdens and responsibilities of life, single or wedded, though she insists on her rights as a human being, and without a touch of the heroic or the supra-sentimental. Ibsen should not be held responsible for the caricatures of womanhood evolved by his disciples. When a woman evades her responsibilities, when she is frivolous or evil, an exponent of the "life-lie" in matrimony, then Ibsen grimly paints her portrait, and we denounce him as cynical for telling the truth. And truth is seldom a welcome guest. But he knows that a fiddle can be mended and a bell not; and in placing his surgeon-like finger on the sorest spot of our social life, he sounds this bell, and when it rings cracked he coldly announces the fact. But his attitude toward marriage is not without its mystery. In Love's Comedy his hero and heroine part, fearing the inevitable shipwreck in the union of two poetic hearts without the necessary means of a prosaic subsistence. In the later plays, marriage for gain, for home, for anything but love, brings upon its victims the severest consequences; John Gabriel Borkman, Hedda, Dora, Mrs. Alving, Allmers, Rubek, are examples. The idea of man's cruelty to man or woman, or woman's cruelty to woman or man, lashes him into a fury. Then he becomes Ibsen the Berserker.
Therefore let us beware the pitfalls dug by some Ibsen exegetists; the genius of the dramatist is too vast and versatile to be pinned down to a single formula. If you believe that he is dangerous to young people, let it be admitted—but so are Thackeray, Balzac, and Hugo. So is any strong thinker. Ibsen is a powerful dissolvent for an imagination clogged by theories of life, low ideals, and the facile materialism that exalts the letter but slays the spirit. He is a foe to compromise, a hater of the half-way, the roundabout, the weak-willed, above all, a hater of the truckling politician—he is a very Torquemada to politicians. At the best there is ethical grandeur in his conceptions, and if the moral stress is unduly felt, if he tears asunder the veil of our beloved illusions and shows us as we are, it is because of his righteous indignation against the platitudinous hypocrisy of modern life. His unvarying code is: "So to conduct one's life as to realise oneself." Withal an artist, not the evangelist of a new gospel, not the social reformer, not the exponent of science in the drama. These titles have been thrust upon him by his overheated admirers. He never posed as a prophet. He is poet, psychologist, skald, dramatist, not always a soothsayer. The artist in him preserved him from the fate of the didactic Tolstoy. With the Russian he shares the faculty of emptying souls. Ibsen, who vaguely recalls Stendhal in his clear-eyed vision and dry irony, is without a trace of the Frenchman's cynicism or dilettantism. Like all dramatists of the first rank, the Norwegian has in him much of the seer, yet he always avoided the pontifical tone; he may be a sphinx, but he never plays the oracle. His categorical imperative, however, "All or nothing," does not bear the strain of experience. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at such an intolerable tension. The very illusions he seeks to destroy would be supplanted by others. Man exists because of his illusions. Without the "life-lie" he would perish in the mire. His illusions are his heritage from aeons of ancestors. The classic view considered man as the centre of the universe; that position has been ruthlessly altered by science—we are now only tiny points of consciousness in unthinkable space. Isolated then, true children of our inconsiderable planet, we have in us traces of our predecessors. True, one may be disheartened by the pictures of unheroic meanness and petty corruption, the ill-disguised instincts of ape and tiger, in the prose plays, even to the extent of calling them—as did M. Melchior de Vogüé, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet—a grotesque Iliad of Nihilism. But we need not despair. If Ibsen seemed to say for a period, "Evil, be thou my good," his final words in the Epilogue are those of pity and peace: Pax vobiscum!
II
This old man with the head and hair of an electrified Schopenhauer and the torso of a giant, his temperament coinciding with his curt, imperious name, left behind him twenty-six plays, one or more in manuscript. A volume of very subjective poems concludes this long list; among the dramas are at least three of heroic proportion and length. Ibsen was born at Skien, Norway, 1828. His forebears were Danish, German, Scotch, and Norwegian. His father, a man of means, failed in business, and at the age of eight the little Henrik had to face poverty. His schooling was of the slightest. He was not much of a classical scholar and soon he was apprenticed to an apothecary at Grimstad, the very name of which evokes a vision of gloominess. He did not prove a success as a druggist, as he spent his spare time reading and caricaturing his neighbours. His verse-making was desultory, his accustomed mien an unhappy combination of Hamlet and Byron; his misanthropy at this period recalls that of the young Schopenhauer. His favourite reading was poetry and history, and he had a predilection for sketching and conjuring tricks. It might be pointed out that here in the raw were the aptitudes of a future dramatist: poetry, pictures, illusion. In the year 1850 Ibsen published his first drama, derived from poring over Sallust and Cicero. It was a creditable effort of youth, and to the discerning it promised well for his literary future. He was gifted, without doubt, and from the first he sounded the tocsin of revolt. Pessimistic and rebellious his poems were; he had tasted misery, his home was an unhappy one—there was little love in it for him—and his earliest memories were clustered about the town jail, the hospital, and the lunatic asylum. These images were no doubt the cause of his bitter and desperate frame of mind; grinding poverty, the poverty of a third-rate provincial town in Norway, was the climax of his misery. And then, too, the scenery, rugged and noble, and the climate, depressing for months, all had their effect upon his sensitive imagination. From the start, certain conceptions of woman took root in his mind and reappear in nearly all his dramas. Catalina's wife, Aurelia, and the vestal Furia, who are reincarnated in the Dagny and Hjordis of his Vikings, reappear in A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and at the last in When We Dead Awake. One is the eternal womanly, the others the destructive feminine principle, woman the conqueror. As Catalina is a rebel against circumstances, so are Maja and the sculptor in the Epilogue of 1899. There is almost a half century of uninterrupted composition during which this group of men and women disport themselves. Brand, a poetic rather than an acting drama, is no exception; Brand and the Sheriff, Agnes and Gerda. These types are cunningly varied, their traits so concealed as to be recognised only after careful study. But the characteristics of each are alike. The monotony of this procedure is redeemed by the unity of conception—Ibsen is the reflective poet, the poet who conceives the idea and then clothes it, therein differing from Shakespeare and Goethe, to whom form and idea are simultaneously born.
In March, 1850, he went to Christiania and entered Heltberg's school as a preparation for the university. His studies were brief. He became involved in a boyish revolutionary outburst—in company with his life-long friend, the good-hearted Björnstjerne Björnson, who helped him many times—and while nothing serious occurred, it caused the young man to effervesce with literary plans and the new ideas of his times. The Warrior's Tomb, his second play, was accepted and actually performed at the Christiania theatre. The author gave up his university dreams and began to earn a rude living by his pen. He embarked in newspaper enterprises which failed. An extremist politically, he soon made a crop of enemies, the wisest crop a strong character can raise; but he often worked on an empty stomach in consequence. The metal of the man showed from the first: endure defeat, but no compromise! He went to Bergen in 1851 and was appointed theatre poet at a small salary; this comprised a travelling stipend. Ibsen saw the Copenhagen and Dresden theatres with excellent results. His eyes were opened to the possibilities of his craft, and on his return he proved a zealous stage manager. He composed, in 1853, St. John's Night, which was played at his theatre, and in 1857 Fru Inger of Oesträtt was written. It is old-fashioned in form, but singularly lifelike in characterization and fruitful in situations. The story is semi-historical. In the Lady Inger we see a foreshadowing of his strong, vengeful women. Olaf Liljekrans need not detain us. The Vikings (1858) is a sterling specimen of drama, in which legend and history are artfully blended. The Feast of Solhaug (1857) was very successful in its treatment of the saga, and is comparatively cheerful.