As an acting rôle Nora has won the suffrages of such artists as Betty Hennings, Agnes Sorma, Hélène Odilon, Gabrielle Réjane, Friederike Gossmann, Lilly Petri, Modjeska, Mrs. Fiske, Irene Triesch, Hilda Borgström (a great Hilda Wangel), Stella Hohenfels, and Eleonore Duse.
Henrik Ibsen once attended a dinner given in his honour by the Ladies' Club of Christiania, and made a speech about himself in answer to a toast. Miss Osina Krog, in proposing Ibsen's health, spoke of him as a poet who had done much for woman through his works. Dr. Ibsen's reply was this:—
All that I have composed has not proceeded from a conscious tendency. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than has been believed. I have never regarded the women's cause as a question in itself, but as a question of mankind, not of women. It is most certainly desirable to solve the woman question among others, but that was not the whole intention. My task was the description of man. Is it to some extent true that the reader weaves his own feelings and sentiments in with what he reads and that they are attributed to the poet? Not alone those who write, but also those who read, compose, and very often they are more full of poetry than the poet himself. I take the liberty to thank you for the toast, with a modification, for I see that women have a great task before them in the field for which this ladies' association works. I drink the health of the club and wish it happiness and success.
I have always regarded it as my task to raise the country and to give the people a higher position. In this work two factors assert themselves. It is for the mothers to awake, by slow and intense work, a conscious feeling of culture and discipline. This feeling must be awakened in individuals before one can elevate a people. The women will solve the question of mankind, but they must do so as mothers. Herein lies the great task of women.
And this speech quite dissipates the notion that Ibsen had affiliations with the Feminists.
VIII
GHOSTS
(1881)
Following the scandal created by the first performance of A Doll's House, Ghosts seemed like a deliberate affront to his critics, a gauntlet hurled into their faces by the sturdy arm of Dr. Ibsen. Now, he said, in effect,—though he has never condescended to pulpit polemics or café Æsthetics,—here is a wife who resolves to endure who stays at home and bears that burden. Nora Helmer refused! Behold Mrs. Alving, the womanly woman, good housewife—malgré elle même—and good mother!
Ghosts, like much that is great in art, is a very painful play. So is Macbeth, so is Lear, so is Œdipus Rex. There are some painful pictures in the small gallery of the world's greatest art, and in music analogous examples are not wanting. Probably the most poignant emotional music thus far written is to be found in the last movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Symphony. It is cosmic in its hopeless woe. Yet Ibsen gives the screw a tighter wrench, for he conceived the idea of transposing all the horror of the antique drama to the canvas of contemporary middle-class life.