Three fundamental ideas of Christianity are ever present in his mind, and about these as round so many axes revolves the entire activity of his poetical imagination. These three unalterable central ideas, constituting genuine obsessions, reaching up from the unconscious into his intellectual life, are original sin, confession and self-sacrifice or redemption.
Æsthetic chatterers have spoken of the idea of heredity influencing all Ibsen’s works, an idea which cannot escape even the feeblest attention, as something appertaining to modern science and Darwinism. As a matter of fact, it is the ever-recurring original sin of St. Augustine, and it betrays its theological nature, firstly by the circumstance that it makes its appearance in conjunction with the two other theological ideas of confession and redemption, and secondly, by the distinguishing characteristic of hereditary transmission. As we have above seen, Ibsen’s personages always inherit a disease (blindness, consumption of the spinal marrow, madness), a vice (mendaciousness, levity, lewdness, obduracy), or some defect (incapacity for enjoyment), but never an agreeable or useful quality. Now what is good and wholesome is just as frequently inherited as what is evil and diseased—even more frequently, according to many investigators. Hence if Ibsen had really wished to exhibit the operation of the law of heredity as understood by Darwin, he would have offered us at least one example, if only one, of the inheritance of good qualities. But not a single instance is to be met with in all his dramas. What his beings possess of good, comes one knows not whence. They have always inherited nothing but evil. The gentle Hedvig in The Wild Duck becomes blind like her father, Werle. But from whom does she get her dreamy wealth of imagination, her devoted loving heart? Her father is a cold egoist, and her mother a clever, practical, prosaic housewife. Thus she can never have inherited her fine qualities from either of her parents. From them she receives only her eye-disease. With Ibsen heredity is only a visitation, a punishment for the sins of the fathers; science knows of no such exclusive heredity; theology alone knows it, and it is simply original sin.
Ibsen’s second theological motif is confession; in nearly all his pieces such is the goal to which all the action tends; not, perchance, forced by circumstances upon a dissimulating offender, not the inevitable revelation of a hidden misdeed, but the voluntary outpouring of a pent-up soul, the voluptuous, self-tormenting disclosure of an ugly inner wound, the remorseful ‘My guilt, my deepest guilt!’ of the sinner breaking down under the weight of his burdened conscience, humbling himself to an avowal that he may find inward peace; in short, genuine confession as required by the Church. In A Doll’s House, Helmer informs his wife (p. 44): ‘Many a man can lift himself up again morally if he openly recognises his offence and undergoes its punishment.... Only just think how a man so conscious of guilt as that must go about everywhere lying, and a hypocrite, and an actor; how he must wear a mask towards his neighbour, and even his wife and children.’ For him not the guilt, but the dissimulation, is the great evil, and its true expiation consists in ‘public avowal’—i.e., in confession. In the same piece Mrs. Linden, without any external necessity, and simply in obedience to an inner impulse, makes the following confession (p. 87): ‘I, too, have suffered shipwreck.... I had no choice at the time’; while later on she develops the theory of confession once more (p. 90): ‘Helmer must know everything; between those two there must be the completest possible understanding, and that can never come to pass while all these excuses and concealments are going on.’
In The Pillars of Society Miss Hessel exacts a confession in these terms (p. 70):
Here you are, the first man in the town, living in wealth and pride, in power and honour—you who have set the brand of crime upon an innocent man.
Bernick. Do you think I do not feel deeply how I have wronged him? Do you think I am not prepared to make atonement?
Lona. How? By speaking out?
Bernick. Can you ask such a thing?
Lona. What else can atone for such a wrong?
And Johan also says (p. 75):