There is in John Gabriel Borkman logical, well-knit construction. There is an unflinching criticism of life—the attitude of a man who began life as a poet and ends it as a realist; there is a strange power, unpleasant power, a meagre intensity, yet unquestionable intensity, and a genius for character-drawing and development of character that is just short of the marvellous. That Ibsen has chosen his characters from the world about him—a provincial, narrow, hard, cold world,—is a commentary on his truthfulness, on his adherence to realistic principles. The curious part of this is the resemblance his bourgeois people bear to the bourgeois of nearly every civilized country.
John Gabriel Borkman is a play of great power, of a frugal, constructive beauty, and in it from first to last there sounds faintly but distinctly an antique note. There is also something of a Hamlet situation in the position of the young man who might have won back his father's kingdom, but quite like a modern Hamlet solved the knotty problem by going away to Paris; any place, far away from the bleak northern world where lived in a gloomy house his father, an ex-convict, his mother, a soured fanatic, and his aunt, an old maid and an idealist.
John Gabriel Borkman, thirteen years previous to the opening of the play, had been a gigantic speculator. All Norway, all the world, would have been at his feet if he had not failed at the moment when success seemed assured. By his downfall hundreds were enmeshed in ruin, and the man went to prison for five years, leaving behind a heartbroken wife and a young son. This boy, Erhart, was taken away and raised by a rich aunt, but is now at home, where he has lived for eight years when the curtain rises.
Mrs. Borkman is discovered in her old-fashioned drawing-room, in the house saved out of the wreckage by her twin sister, Ella Rentheim. She is longing for the return of her son Erhart, in whom she discerns the saviour of the family. Her sister enters, and in his own remarkable, sharp way Ibsen lets us witness the spiritual tragedy in the lives of the pair. They both love Erhart, as formerly Ella had loved his father, John Gabriel Borkman. The women hate each other, and their duel is fought out in half-uttered sentences, pregnant pauses, and deadly glances. It is the perfection of dialogue-writing and clear exposition. You catch dim perspectives of the past, the treachery of the husband of Mrs. Borkman, and of darker depths which are later explored. The mother—oh, such a pitiful, harsh, sorrowful, repellent mother, nursing her injuries until they become hissing vipers in her bosom—defies her sister to win away the love of her son, that son she has dedicated to the mission of rehabilitating the fortunes and good name of the Borkmans. With cutting humility she acknowledges that she eats the bread of her sister's charity, and then they hear footsteps. Is it Erhart returning? No; it is some one up in the long gallery overhead! It is the ex-convict, ex-banker, and swindler, John Gabriel Borkman, who has never left the house since his release eight years before. Mrs. Borkman cries:—
"It sometimes seems more than I can endure—always to hear him up there walking, walking. From the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night. And one hears every step so plainly! I have often felt as if I had a sick wolf up there, prowling up and down in a cage. Right over my head, too! Listen! there he goes. Up and down, up and down, the wolf is prowling."
Then Erhart, a lively young man of about twenty-three, enters, welcomes his aunt affectionately, his mother carelessly. With him is a Mrs. Wilton, a beautiful young woman, whose husband has deserted her. The pair are in love, although the mother does not quite see it. Mrs. Wilton wishes Erhart to go with her to a neighbor's house, a Mr. Hinkle's, but his duty is at home and she leaves him, the air being promise-crammed with tantalizing hopes of pleasure and caprice. The young man soon tires of the bickerings about him, and after declaring that his aunt should be in bed after her long journey, leaves his mother alone, and as the curtain falls she exclaims: "Erhart, Erhart, be true to me! Oh, come home and help your mother! For I can bear this life no longer."
Her mother's heart tells her that her boy is being drawn away from her, drawn by some force she cannot analyze.
In Act II we get a picture of the "sick wolf up there," John Gabriel Borkman himself. He is one of Ibsen's most veracious portraits. He clings with unshaken obstinacy to the belief that he only sinned against himself, that if he had been given time, that if he had not been betrayed by a false friend, he would have pulled through. All these facts are deftly brought out by conversation with the half-pathetic, half-ludicrous figure of an humble bank clerk, the only one of Borkman's friends who has clung to him in his reverses, although Borkman has swept away his poor earnings. The contrast of the pair—Borkman, almost satanic in his pride and his belief that he will eventually regain his position in society, and the feeble aspirations of the poor clerk, who is a poetaster—is wonderfully managed. There is a quarrel, and Borkman is left to his gloomy thoughts, and then Ella Rentheim comes in and one of the most powerful situations of the play ensues.
It has developed that Borkman has always loved Ella, but gave her up and married her sister because an influential man who could advance his interests was also in love with Ella. This man, not being able to marry her, betrayed Borkman and his schemes. His name is Hinkle, and at his very house that night, near Christiania (the scene of the play), Erhart Borkman is enjoying himself with Mrs. Wilton and not caring a rap for his sick-souled father, mother, and aunt.
When Borkman finally acknowledges to Ella that in his lust for power he has sacrificed his love of her, and has sacrificed it uselessly, she turns on him and cries "Criminal!" She goes on:—