Dr. Wicksteed concludes that "the strength and weakness of Ibsen's much-discussed treatment of marriage lie in the fact that he does not deal with it as marriage at all, but as the most striking instance of the ever recurrent problem of social life, the problem that we may hide in other cases, but must face here, the problem of combining freedom with permanence and loyalty, of combining self-surrender with self-realization."
Faguet scores Brandes for denying that Ibsen alone among dramatists has used the symbol in a peculiarly poetic manner, proving that if Ibsen is a realist he is also a psychologist, who with his lantern illuminates the recesses of the soul. "For example," writes M. Faguet, "in Rosmersholm, northern nature in its entirety, with its savageness, its immense expanse of space, its broad horizons, its lofty heavens, is the symbol, to my mind, of the moral liberty to which aspire several characters of the play, as, indeed, do half of Ibsen's characters." Finally, the symbol is above all a means for the dramatic poet to give full expression to the poetry in his soul ... in Ibsen it is essentially a direct product of the author's poetic faculty.... "Up to the present time Ibsen is the only dramatic poet to write symbolical dramas, that is to say, dramas into which a symbol is introduced occasionally by way of explanation or commentary, or as an element of beauty." The symbol, then, is not a sign of a weakened imagination, as some bigoted "psychiatrists" would have us believe.
And the interpretation of Rosmersholm! Not a half-dozen actresses on the globe have grasped the complex skeins of Rebekka West's character, and grasping them have been able to send across the footlights the shivering music of her soul. Thus far Scandinavian women have best interpreted her to the satisfaction of the poet. The Italians are too tragic, the French too histrionically brilliant; it is a new virtuosity, a new fingering of the dramatic keyboard, that is demanded.
XII
THE LADY FROM THE SEA
(1888)
Told with infinite technical skill, displayed on a canvas, the tints of which modulate from dull copper to the vague mistiness of a summer sea, this mermaid allegory of Ibsen had a charm that has almost vanished in the translation and vanishes still more at a performance. Ellida Wangel, The Lady from the Sea, is the second wife of Dr. Wangel, a sensible, healthy bourgeois. She is jealous of his dead wife, she is a neurotic creature given to reverie and easily impressed by the strange, the far-away, the poetry of distance. In a mood of fantastic excitement she once betrothed herself to a stranger, a sailor on an American ship. He comes back to claim her, and so perfectly adjusted are the atmospheric conditions of the drama, that we believe she should leave her home and go away with this slightly supernatural and old-time romantic figure.
In a stirring interview Ellida lets out the truths about her married life to the perplexed Wangel—who is a sort of elder brother to Helmer, though kinder of heart. "You bought me," she cries, her bosom overcharged with the truth. It is the truth, but then, who cares co face domestic truth? The worthy doctor is sadly taken aback. He had married Ellida because his children needed a mother; he had—and "you bought me all the same," is the cutting response. It is so. The man sees the case from a different angle, and listens to her story of the stranger. She will go when he returns, she says. He does return. He does claim her; and in the garden scene at the end we see a situation not unlike that last act of Candida. The stranger bids Ellida prepare for departure. Wangel, who knows women better than it would appear, tells her to go. "Now you can choose in freedom and your own responsibility." The woman wavers and finally sends the sailor about his business. The problem has been solved. Ellida can go to her husband of her own free will.
Wicksteed's comment is refreshing. "The mere freedom of choice in which Ellida Wangel and Nora Helmer lay such stress is but a condition, not a principle of healthy life.... Without the spirit of self-surrender free choice will never secure self-realization." This lady of the light-house—Ellida was brought up in one—has two stepdaughters, the eldest of whom contracts a loveless marriage, as does Svanhild in The Comedy of Love, for the sake of a comfortable home. This parallelism in the sub-plot is a favourite device of Ibsen—as though the children mimicked the parents. The younger daughter later becomes the celebrated Hilda Wangel who charms Master Builder Solness to his glory and ruin. There is little in her here that gives evidence of such potentialities. She is rather pert, wild, and self-conscious. The men of the play are all excellently sketched. The Lady of the Sea, too, presents, in a hazy symbol, the old lesson of individuality and free choice. But the parable has never been so poetically uttered except in Brand.