Gregers. Haven’t you done it yet?
Hjalmar (aloud). It is done.
Gregers. It is?... After so great a crisis—a crisis that’s to be the starting-point of an entirely new life—of a communion founded on truth, and free from falsehood of any kind.... Surely you feel a new consecration after the great crisis.
Hjalmar. Yes, of course I do—that is, in a sort of way.
Gregers. For I’m sure there’s nothing in the world to compare with the joy of forgiving one who has erred, and raising her up to one’s self in love, etc.
On his way to the guillotine, Avinain, the French assassin, condensed the experience of his life in the pithy saying, ‘Never confess.’ But this is advice which only those of strong will and healthy minds can follow. A lively idea vehemently demands to be transformed into movement. The movement exacting the least effort is that of the small muscles of the larynx, tongue, and lips, i.e., the organs of speech. Anyone, therefore, having a specially lively idea experiences a strong desire to relax those cell-groups of his brain in which this idea is elaborated by allowing the transmission of their stimulus to the organs of speech. In a word, he desires to speak out. And if he is weak, if the inhibitive power of the will is not greater than the motor impulse proceeding from the ideational centre, he will burst out into speech, be the consequences what they may. That this psychological law has always been known is proved by all literature, from the fable of King Midas to Dostojewski’s Raskolnikow; and the Catholic Church furnished one more proof of her profound knowledge of human nature which she transformed the primitive Christian custom of confession before the assembled congregation, which was to be a self-humiliation and expiation, into auricular confession, which serves the purpose of a safe and blissful alleviation and relaxation, and constitutes for ordinary men a primary psychic need of the first order. It was this sort of confession which Ibsen, probably unconsciously, had in view. (‘Because I must have someone in whom I can confide,’ as Ellida says.) Himself a degenerate, Ibsen can picture to himself only the intellectual life of degenerates, in whom the mechanism of inhibition is always disordered, and who, therefore, cannot escape from the impulse to confess, when anything of an absorbing or exciting character exists in their consciousness.
The third and most important theological obsession of Ibsen is the saving act of Christ, the redemption of the guilty by a voluntary acceptance of their guilt. This devolution of sin upon a lamb of sacrifice occupies the same position in Ibsen’s drama as in Richard Wagner’s. The motif of the sacrificial lamb and of redemption is constantly present in his mind, certainly not always clear and comprehensible, but, conformably with the confusion of his thought, diversely distorted, obscured, and, so to speak, in contrapuntal inversion. Now Ibsen’s personages voluntarily and joyfully bear the cross, in keeping with the Christ-idea; now it is put upon their shoulders by force or artifice, which is, as theologians would say, a diabolical mockery of this idea; now the sacrifice for another is sincere, now mere hypocrisy; the effects Ibsen draws from the incessantly recurring motif are, agreeably with its form, now moral and affecting, now comically base and repulsive.
In The Pillars of Society there is a talk of some ‘scandal’ which occurred years before the commencement of the piece. The husband of the actress Dorf, on returning home one evening, found her with a stranger, who, on his entrance, sprang out of the window. The affair caused great excitement and indignation in the Norwegian Gotham. Immediately afterwards Johan Tönnesen fled to America. Everyone looked upon him as the ‘culprit.’ In reality, however, it was his brother-in-law, Bernick. Johan had voluntarily incurred the blame of Bernick’s fault. On his return from America the sinner and the sacrificial lamb discuss the circumstance (p. 45):
Bernick. Johan, now we are alone, you must give me leave to thank you.
Johan. Oh, nonsense!