Hence, as we have seen, not one of the sophisms of the Æsthetes withstands criticism. The work of art is not its own aim, but it has a specially organic, and a social task. It is subject to the moral law; it must obey this; it has claim to esteem only if it is morally beautiful and ideal. And it cannot be other than natural and true, in so far, at least, as it is the offprint of a personality, which is also a part of nature and reality. The entire system takes as its point of departure a few erroneous or imprudent assertions of thinkers and poets commanding respect, but developed by the Parnassians and Decadents in a way of which Lessing, Kant and Schiller never allowed themselves to dream. This is no other than the well-known attempt to explain and justify impulsions by motives more or less obvious and invented post facto. The degenerate who, in consequence of their organic aberrations, make the repulsive and ugly, vice and crime, the subject-matter of plastic and literary works of art, naturally have recourse to the theory that art has nothing in common with morality, truth and beauty, since this theory has for them the value of an excuse. And must not the excessive value set upon artistic activity as such, without regard to the worth of its results, be highly welcome to the limitless crowd of imitators who practise art, not from an inner prompting, but from a foolhardy craving for the respect surrounding real artists—imitators who have nothing of their own to say, no emotion, not an idea, but who, with a superficial professional dexterity easily acquired, falsify the views and feelings of masters in all branches of art? This rabble, which claims for itself a top place in the scale of intellectual rank, and freedom from the constraint of all moral laws as its most noble privilege, is certainly baser than the lowest scavenger. These creatures are of absolutely no use to the commonwealth, and injure true art by their productions, whose multitude and importunateness shut out from most men the sight of the genuine works of art—never very numerous—of the epoch. They are weaklings in will, unfitted for any activity requiring regular uniform efforts, or else victims to vanity, wishing to be more famous than is possible to a stone-breaker or a tailor. The uncertainty of comprehension and taste among the majority of mankind, and the incompetency of most professional critics, allow these intruders to make their nest among the arts, and to dwell there as parasites their life long. The buyer soon distinguishes a good boot from a bad one, and the journeyman cobbler who cannot properly sew on a sole finds no employment. But that a book or painting void of all originality is indifferent in quality, and for that reason superfluous, is by no means so easily recognised by the Philistine, or even by the man armed with the critical pen, and the producer of such chaff can apply himself undisturbed to his assiduous waste of time. These bunglers with pen, brush and modelling spattle, strutting about in cap and doublet, naturally swear by the doctrine of the Æsthetes, carry themselves as if they were the salt of humanity, and make a parade of their contempt for the Philistine. They belong, however, to the elements of the race which are most inimical to society. Insensible to its tasks and interests, without the capacity to comprehend a serious thought or a fruitful deed, they dream only of the satisfaction of their basest instincts, and are pernicious—through the example they set as drones, as well as through the confusion they cause in minds insufficiently forewarned, by their abuse of the word ‘art’ to mean demoralization and childishness. Ego-maniacs, Decadents and Æsthetes have completely gathered under their banner this refuse of civilized peoples, and march at its head.
[CHAPTER IV.]
IBSENISM.
In the course of the last two centuries the whole civilized world has, with greater or less unanimity, repeatedly recognised a sort of intellectual royalty in some contemporary, to whom it has rendered homage as the first and greatest among living authors. For a great part of the eighteenth century Voltaire, ‘le roi Voltaire,’ was the ‘poet laureate’ of all civilized nations. During the first third of the present century this position was held by Goethe. After his death the throne remained vacant for a score of years, when Victor Hugo ascended it amidst the enthusiastic acclamations of the Latin and Slavonic races, and with a feeble opposition from those of Teutonic origin, to hold it until the end of his life.
At the present time voices have for some years been heard in all countries claiming for Henrik Ibsen the highest intellectual honours at the disposal of mankind. It is wished that the Norwegian dramatist should, in his old age, be recognised as the world-poet of the closing century. It is true that only a part of the multitude and of the critical representatives of its taste acclaims him; but the fact that it has entered anyone’s mind at all to see in him a claimant for the throne of poetry makes a minute examination of his titles to the position necessary.
That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power is not for a moment to be denied. He is extraordinarily emotive, and has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and impressive manner that which has excited his feelings. (We shall see that these are almost always feelings of hatred and rage, i.e., of displeasure.) A natural capacity drew him towards the stage—a capacity for imagining situations in which the characters are forced to turn inside out their inmost nature; in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds, and modes of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible to the senses, but potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature and in words. Like Richard Wagner, he knows how to group events into living frescoes possessing the charm of significant pictures; with this difference, however, that Ibsen works, not like Wagner, with strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating vision into the backgrounds of souls and the conditions of humanity. Fairy-lore is not lacking in Ibsen either, but he does not allow the imagination of the spectators to run riot in mere spectacles; he forces them into moods, and binds them by his spell in circles of ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.
His strong desire to embody the thought occupying his mind in a single picture, which can be surveyed at one view, also dictated to him the set form of his drama—a form not invented, but largely perfected, by him. His pieces are, as it were, final words terminating long anterior developments. They are the sudden breaking into flame of combustible materials accumulating during years, it may be during whole human lives, or even generations, and of which the sudden flare brilliantly illumines a wide extent of time and space. The incidents of the Ibsen drama more frequently take place in a day, or at most in twice twenty-four hours, and in this short space of time there are concentred all the effects of the course of the world and of social institutions on certain characters, in such a conspectus that the destinies of the dramatis personæ become clear to us from the moment of their first appearance. The Doll’s House, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, The Pillars of Society, and Hedda Gabler comprise about twenty-four hours; An Enemy of Society, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea, about thirty-six hours. It is the return to the Aristotelian doctrine of the unities of time and space with an orthodoxy compared with which the French classicists of the age of Louis XIV. are heretics. I might well term the Ibsenite technique a technique of fireworks, for it consists in preparing long in advance a staging on which the suns, Roman candles, squibs, fireballs and concluding fire-sheaves are carefully placed in proper position. When all is ready the curtain rises, and the artistically-constructed work begins to crackle, explosion following explosion uninterruptedly with thunder and lightning. This technique is certainly very effective, but hardly true. In reality events rarely lead up to a catastrophe so brilliant and succinct. In Nature all is slowly prepared, and unrolls itself gradually, and the results of human deeds covering years of time do not compress themselves into a few hours. Nature does not work epigrammatically. She cannot trouble herself about Aristotelian unities, for she has always an infinity of affairs of her own in progress at one and the same time. As a matter of handicraft, one is certainly often forced to admire the cleverness with which Ibsen guides and knots the threads of his plot. Sometimes the labour is more successful than at other times, but it always implies a great expenditure of textile skill. Whoever sets most store on truth in a poem—that is, on the natural action of the laws of life—will often enough bring away from Ibsen’s dramas an impression of improbability, and of toilsome and subtle lucubrations.
The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time, which may be said to be the poetic counterpart of the painter’s artifice (difficult, but for the most part barren) of foreshortening in space. Each of the terse words which suffice him has something of the nature of a peep-hole, through which limitless vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples and all ages have few situations at once so perfectly simple and so irresistibly affecting as the scenes—to cite only a few—where Nora is playing with her children,[318] where Dr. Rank relates that he is doomed to imminent death by his inexorable disease,[319] where Frau Alving with horror discerns his dissolute father[320] in her only son, where the housekeeper, Frau Helseth, sees Rosmer and Rebecca die in each other’s arms,[321] etc.