He also pictures the great tragic artist offering a draught of sweetest cruelty to heroic men. Readers interested should study Lessing in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, Schopenhauer's essay on Tragedy, and Nietzsche's valuable contribution to the discussion, his early work, The Birth of Tragedy. The latter extols the Dionysian spirit of the drama—its ecstasy and its triumphant affirmation of life the eternal. Walter Pater should be consulted on the same lofty theme.
In form the perfected Ibsen tragedy follows Sophocles: anterior to the rising of the curtain the various motives have developed and collided in the dark chamber of the dramatist's brain. They are then incarnated for the spectator as they near their catastrophe; thus the most rigid economy of effects is practised, the three unities preached by Boileau are set before us with unerring logic. It is all in a single picture, this dénouement of his character's silent years. The method has its drawbacks, yet there is no denying its intensity, which like the fiery garment of Nessus envelops the dramatist's unhappy men and women. Determinate as is the motivation of these dramas, there is allowed the interval for action that might be described by the tick of the pendulum,—diastole, systole, ebb, and flow. But within that tiny mental territory man is monarch of his acts; moreover, as Ernest Renan suggests, "What we call infinite time is, perhaps, a minute between two miracles." Man dances on the rope of the present between the past and the future, says Nietzsche; the spectacle, brief as it is, has been recorded by Ibsen. Renan, who anticipated Nietzsche by his proclamation that man should be virtuous for virtue's sake alone, without regard for rewards attendant upon its performance, has also written in his preface to Caliban (1878):—
"Man sees clearly at the hour which is striking that he will never know anything of the supreme cause of the universe, or of his own destiny. Nevertheless he wishes to be talked to about all that." And Ibsen has talked to us much about all these things, following Goethe's axiom that "no real circumstance is unpoetic so long as the poet knows how to use it." The theatre director in Faust remarks, "He who brings much, brings something to every one."
Octave Uzanne wrote, "People the orchestra and galleries of a theatre with a thousand Renans and a thousand Herbert Spencers, and the combination of these two thousand brains of genius will not produce aught but the soul of a concierge."
So much for the power of collectivity. This theme which Gustave Le Bon has treated in The Mob and The Psychology of the Peoples—literally a drag-net psychology—? may be found lucidly discussed in Mr. A. B. Walkley's Dramatic Criticism. The modern audience, he says, is no longer a great baby, like the mediæval one, but an intelligent adult. "On this crowd depends our future hopes of the stage."
With all the authorities, apologists, and panegyrists, Ibsen remains a difficult nut to crack. His perversities of execution, aberrations in sentiment, contrarieties, and monumental obstinacy are too much for the average commentator's nerves—why, then, should he be enjoyed by the public when doctors of the drama disagree? His warmest admirers deny him the gift of humour, but we believe that he is the greatest humorist, as well as dramatist, of the nineteenth century. No man, not even Browning, has kept such rigid features in the very face of idiotic abuse and still more silly praise. Not a sense of humour! After A Doll's House came Ghosts, totally contravening the thesis, or supposed thesis, of that problem play; after Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, which declared for the rights of the individual; after this piece the maddening and angular ironies of The Wild Duck, in which he mocks himself, his theories; and then as if to explode the whole Ibsen mine, Rosmersholm appeared. Therein the reformer, whether idealist or of the ordinary peddling political stripe, is mercilessly flayed, and Rebekka West, his wonderful incarnation of passion, deceits, femininity, and renunciation, sacrifices her life to a false ideal, to "Rosmersholm ideals," and mocks herself as she joins in the double suicide. No humour! What, then, of Hedda Gabler, the young woman of to-day; shallow-cultured, her religious underpinning gone, vacillating, cerebral, all nerves full of a Bashkirtseff-like charm, this Hedda who is so modern, who peeps over moral precipices, shudders and peeps again—what preconceived theories of Ibsen did Hedda not upset?
Followed the fantastic Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awake, each mutually destructive of what we supposed Ibsen stood for, destructive of the fumbling decadent that spite depicts him. Not a humorist! Why, Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift, Dumas fils, and Calvin (who was fond of roasting his religious foes) rolled into one is about the happiest formula we can express for the tense-lipped old humorist of Norway!
Like the John Henry Newman of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his chief concern is with the soul. To call him hard names is to betray the inner anxieties that assail us at some time of our existence. "What if this man were telling the truth?" we shiveringly ask. Then we incontinently proceed to stone him to death with scabrous adjectives!
Ibsen never condescended to newspaper polemics—usually the refuge of second-rate men. And his scorn and cruelty are but a disguised kindness; if he lays bare our rickety social systems, our buckram politics, exposes the falsetto of our ideals, the flabbiness of our culture, the cowardice of our ethics, the sleek optimism of our public counsellors, and the dry rot of loveless marriage, it is to blazon our moral maladies that we may seek their cure.
Like John Knox with Mary Stuart, he rudely raps at the door of our hearts, bidding us awaken and open them. He is a voice crying in the wilderness of shams—shams social, the shams of sentiment, of money-getting. And he sometimes fails to discriminate the sheep and goats, tweaking the foolish, self-satisfied noses of the former so sadly, that he has been accused of mixing his moral values. But like Tennyson he knows that there is often honest faith in doubt. His words and works may be compared to that serpent of brass erected by Moses in the midst of his ailing nation, which was at once a symbol and a prophylactic.