Miss Tesman. The first few days, yes. But that won’t last very long. Dear Rina’s little room will not always be empty, that I know.
Hedda. Indeed! Who is going to move into it, eh?
Miss Tesman. Oh, there is always some poor invalid or other who needs to be looked after and tended, unfortunately.
Hedda. Will you really take such a burden upon you again?
Miss Tesman. Burden! God forgive you, child! that has never been a burden to me.
Hedda. But now, if a stranger should come, then surely——
Miss Tesman. Oh, one soon becomes friends with sick people. And I must positively have someone to live for, too.
The three Christo-dogmatic obsessions of original sin, confession, and self-sacrifice, filling Ibsen’s dramas, as we have seen, from the first line to the last, are not the only tokens of his mysticism. This betrays itself by a whole series of other peculiarities, which shall be briefly indicated.
At the head of these stands the astoundingly chaotic nature of his thought. One cannot believe one’s eyes while reading how his fulsome flatterers have had the audacity to extol him for the ‘clearness’ and ‘precision’ of his thought. Do these individuals, then, imagine that no one capable of forming a judgment will ever read a line of Ibsen? A clearly-defined thought is an extraordinary rarity in this Norwegian dramatist. Everything floats and undulates, nebulous and amorphous, such as we are accustomed to see in weak-brained degenerates. And if he once succeeds, with toil and stress, in grasping anything and expressing it in a moderately intelligible manner, he unfailingly hastens, a few pages later, or in a subsequent piece, to say the exact opposite. A talk is made of Ibsen’s ‘ideas on morality’ and of his ‘philosophy.’ He has not formulated a single proposition on morality, a single conception of the world and life, that he has not himself either refuted or fittingly ridiculed.
He seems to preach free love, and his eulogy of a licentiousness unchecked by any self-control, regardless of contracts, laws, and morality, has made of him a ‘modern spirit’ in the eyes of Georg Brandes and similar protectors of those ‘youths who wish to amuse themselves a little.’ Mrs. Alving (Ghosts, p. 158), calls a ‘crime’ the act of Pastor Manders in repulsing her, after she has quitted her husband and thrown herself on the pastor’s neck. This highly-strung dame pushes Regina into the arms of Oswald, her son, when in shameless speech he informs her that it would give him pleasure to possess the girl. And this very same Mrs. Alving speaks in terms of the deepest indignation of her dead husband as ‘profligate’ (p. 146), and again designates him in the presence of her son as a ‘broken-down man’ (in the original it is ‘et forfaldent Menneske,’ an epithet usually bestowed on fallen women), and why? Because he had had wanton relations with women! Well, but is it in Ibsen’s opinion permissible, or not permissible, to gratify carnal lust as often as it is awakened? If it is permissible, how does Mrs. Alving come to speak with scorn of her husband? If it is not permissible, how dared she offer herself to Pastor Manders, and be the procuress between Regina and her own half-brother? Or does the moral law hold good for man only, and not for woman? An English proverb says, ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’ Ibsen evidently does not share the opinion of popular lore. A woman who runs away from her legal husband and pursues a lover (Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert Lövborg, in Hedda Gabler), or who offers to form an illicit connection with a man, although nothing prevents their marrying without further ado like other rational ratepayers (Mrs. Linden and Krogstad in A Doll’s House)—such women have Ibsen’s entire approbation and sympathy. But if a man seduces a maiden and liberally provides for her subsequent maintenance (Werle and Gina in The Wild Duck), or, again, if he has illicit relations with a married woman (Consul Bernick and the actress Dorf in The Pillars of Society), then it is so heinous a crime that the culprit remains branded his whole life, and is nailed by the poet to the pillory with the cruelty of a mediæval executioner.