To this may be answered, If Ibsen with such violence desired to emphasize that life in its entirety, even the most artistic, is to be counted as death, and that only the life of love is real love, to both Irene and Maja, then he was forced to employ the most drastic pictures of the kind of death that life without love assuredly is. Insanity, without a doubt, is both mental and physical death: though the insane may exist, yet humanity does not consider such existence—life.
Had not Irene stood there, so heartbroken, so ill in mind and evil, so desirous and yet so afraid, with the black shadow of cell and restraint in her wake, the lesson of the play would not be too plain, Without love—no life.
It is Irene, of course, who is the star character in the play. It is far from being the undecisive Rubek who not until the hour of his death understood the love which Irene offered him, which in Maja's case was confined to the customs of conventional marriage.
That Henrik Ibsen stands untouched by his weight of years, this drama will ere long announce to the entire world. It is quite true that the structure of the play cannot be analyzed on the spur of the moment. The construction embodies a stage setting which will enhance the worth of the drama. Almost with the identical progress which Irene and Rubek make toward the mountain top the acts unfold themselves lucidly and are entirely comprehensible. The more the psychological problem is studied the better will it be understood why Ibsen is called great.
When We Dead Awake is a master's work and a masterpiece. Like none other is Ibsen—so grand, so mystical, and yet so entirely in agreement with the organic make-up of humanity. From the peak of the mountain he speaks to us, aged as to years, youthful in deed and daring. There is but one ruler, says Henrik Ibsen: the great Eros, and the poet is his prophet!
When We Dead Awake ends the cycle of the noble prose dramas of Henrik Ibsen. Despite Mr. Archer's criticism the play shows little falling off in intensity, even if the motives are thrice familiar. To will greatly is the touchstone of life, to will when you know that you are hedged in by overmastering destiny; to dare, though you know that free will is one of life's darling illusions—that is success in life.
To thy own self be true,
said Shakespeare, and no one has said it with such tragic intensity since him as has Henrik Ibsen.
"It has been a veritable misfortune for Æsthetics that the word 'drama' has always been translated by 'action,'" wrote Nietzsche. "Wagner is not the only one who errs here; all the world is still in error about the matter; even the philologists ought to know better. The ancient drama had grand pathetic scenes in view; it first excluded action (relegated it previous to the commencement, or behind the scene). The word 'drama' is of Doric origin, and according to Dorian usage signifies 'event,' 'history,' both words in a hieratic sense. The oldest drama represented local legend, the 'sacred history,' on which the establishment of the cult rested (consequently no doing but a happening....)"
And elsewhere Nietzsche declares: "The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and most severe problems, the will to live life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I call Dionysian, that is what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that Aristotle understood it), but beyond terror and pity, to realize in fact the eternal delight of becoming—that delight which even involves in itself the joy of annihilation."