The end is as relentless as a Greek tragedy. The boy chases his mother from room to room imploring and screaming at her to rid him of his pain; as she brought him into life without his consent, so should she send him forth from it when he bade her. It is all frightful, but enthralling. When Oswald cries aloud for the sun, the end has been reached. He is a hapless lunatic, and his wretched, half-crazed mother, remembering her promise to him, searches frantically in his pocket for the morphine, and then a merciful curtain bars out from further view the finale. If Ibsen's scalpel digs down too deep and jars some hidden and diseased nerves, what shall we say? Rather can he not turn upon us and cry, "I but hold the mirror up to nature; behold yourselves in all your nakedness, in all your corruption!" Anatole France once wrote, "If the will of those who are no more is to be imposed on those who still are, it is the dead who live, and the live men who become the dead ones." And this idea is the motive of Ghosts.
IX
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
(1882)
Ibsen was called such hard names when Ghosts was produced that William Archer made a collection of all the epithets hurled at the dramatist's head and published them in the Pall Mall Gazette with the title Ghosts and Gibberings. Of course the Norwegian was indignant that his play should have been so grossly misunderstood, and in An Enemy of the People he undertook to show that the reformer—the true pioneer—is always abused and pilloried as a dangerous foe to society, and that the majority is always in the wrong. It is merely a case of Horace's odi profanum vulgus over again. But how did the playwright go about his task? Did he paint for us another Ajax defying the social lightning? Did he give us a modern Coriolanus? With his usual ideal-demolishing propensities this terrible old man makes his hero a fussy doctor—a man of the middle classes; a man who forgets the names of the servant girls; a man who loves to see his children feed on roast beef; a man who is economical in little things; a thorough professional gentleman, who explodes, fusses, fumes, fidgets, goes off continually at half cock; a crack-brained enthusiast, a fanatic, and a teller of disagreeable truths. But this doctrinaire with torn trousers is a mighty fellow after all, and by the supreme genius of his creator has quite as much right to live as any Homeric hero. Vitality is the most masterful test of a dramatist's characters; their vitality is their excuse for being. Every figure in An Enemy of the People is brimming with vitality, from the drunken man to Dr. Stockmann. Of course you can hardly be expected to take an overweening interest in the condition of the water pipes in that little town on the south coast of Norway. What are water pipes to Hecuba? Yet a world of principle is involved in these same germ-breeding conduits, and the crafty dramatist has, while apparently depicting local types, contrived to paint a large canvas. Have we not our Burgomaster Stockmanns, our Editor Hovstads, our timid meliorists like Aslaken, and our fire-eating Billings? Men, men all of them.
What a daring thing it was to write a play without a love scene, a play which is more like life than all the sensualistic caterwaulings, philanderings, and bosh and glitter of the conventional stage, which we fondly fancy holds the mirror up to nature! I have before dwelt on the frugality of his phrases, of the delicacy and concise cleaving power of his dialogues. He has broken with the convention of monologues, of mechanical exits—indeed, of everything which savours of old-time stage artifice. His acts terminate naturally, yet are pregnant with possibilities. You impatiently wait for the next scene, and all because a lot of nobodies in an out-of-the-way Norwegian health resort fight a man who is crazy to tell the truth—and ruin the place. But they are human beings even if they strut not in doublets and hose, and pour not out perfumed passion to the damosel on the balcony.
One cannot sympathize much with Dr. Stockmann. He, while being "the strongest man on earth," brought a calamity on his native place by his awful propensity for blabbing out the truth. Besides, Ibsen leaves us just a margin of doubt in the matter. Perhaps the worthy medical man was not correct in his diagnosis of the waters, and if this were so his conduct was inexcusable. But he fought for that most dangerous of ideals,—the truth, even though he flaunts in the face of the mob the fact that "a normally constituted truth lives, let me say as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years: at the outside twenty; seldom longer."
One recalls Matthew Arnold's lecture on Numbers, in which that essayist preached the evils of majority. Ibsen hits at democracy when he can—for him the mass of the people is led by the few. An Enemy of the People is an excellent repertory piece, though one feels the moral stress too strongly in it.