The same contradiction finds its expression in another and more general form. At one time Ibsen contends with ferocious, impetuosity that everyone is ‘a law unto himself’ alone, i.e., that he should obey every one of his caprices, nay, even of his diseased impulsions; that, as his commentators idiotically put it, he should (sich auslebe) ‘live out his life.’ In The Pillars of Society Miss Bernick says to Dina (p. 94):
Promise me to make him [her betrothed] happy.
Dina. I will not promise anything. I hate this promising; things must come as they can [i.e., as the circumstances of the moment may suggest to the wayward brain].
Martha. Yes, yes; so they must. You need only remain as you are, true and faithful to yourself.
Dina. That I will, Aunt Martha.
In Rosmersholm, Rosmer says admiringly of the scoundrel Brendel (p. 28): ‘At least he has had the courage to live his life his own way. I don’t think that’s such a small matter after all.’ In the same piece Rebecca complains (p. 97): ‘Rosmersholm has broken me.... Broken me utterly and hopelessly. I had a fresh, undaunted will when I came here. Now I have bent my neck under a strange law.’ And further on (p. 102): ‘It is the Rosmer view of life ... that has infected my will.... and made it sick, enslaved it to laws that had no power over me before.’ Ejlert Lövborg laments in like fashion in Hedda Gabler. ‘But it is this—that I don’t want to live that kind of life either. Not now, over again. It is the courage of life and the defiance of life that she’ (Thea Elvested, with her sweet, loving constraint) ‘has snapped in me.’ Quite in opposition to these views, Ibsen, in his Ghosts, makes Regina proclaim her ‘right to live out her life’ in these words (p. 189): ‘Oh! I really can’t stop out here in the country and wear myself out nursing sick people ... a poor girl must make the best of her young days.... I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving.’ Mrs. Alving replies: ‘Alas! yes.’ This ‘alas’ is bewildering. Alas? Why ‘alas’? Does she not obey her ‘law’ if she satisfies her ‘joy in living,’ and, as she forthwith explains, enters the house of ill-fame for sailors set up by the joiner Engstrand? How can Mrs. Alving utter this ‘alas,’ when she also was ‘obeying her law’ in offering herself as the mistress of Pastor Manders, and since she wished to aid her son in ‘obeying his law,’ when he had set his eyes on Regina? It is because Ibsen, in his lucid moments, feels that there may be something of danger in ‘obeying one’s law,’ and this ‘alas’ of Mrs. Alving escapes him as a confession. In The Wild Duck he ridicules his own dogma in the most liberal style. In that piece there is one Molvig, a candidate for a University degree, who also ‘obeys his law.’ This law prescribes that he shall learn nothing, evade his examinations, and pass his nights in taverns. The scoffer, Relling, asserts (p. 317) that it ‘comes over him like a sort of possession; and then I have to go out on the loose with him. Molvig is a demoniac, you see, ... and demoniac natures are not made to walk straight through the world; they must meander now and then. And in order that there shall be no doubt as to what Relling means by this, he subsequently explains (p. 361): ‘“What the devil do you mean by demoniac?” “It’s only a piece of hocus-pocus I’ve invented to keep up a spark of life in him. But for that the poor harmless creature would have succumbed to self-contempt and despair many a long year ago.”’
That is true. Molvig is a pitiable weakling, unable to conquer his indolence and passion for drink; abandoned to his own devices, he would recognise himself for the miserable creature he is, and despise himself as profoundly as he deserves; but Relling arrives on the scene, and gives his lack of character the title ‘demoniac,’ and now ‘the child has a fine name,’ which Molvig can make a parade of to himself and others. Ibsen does exactly the same thing as his Relling. The weakness of will, incapable of resisting base and pitiable instincts, he praises as the ‘will to live out one’s life,’ as the ‘freedom of a spirit who obeys his own law only,’ and recommends it as the sole rule of life. But, unlike Relling, he is for the most part ignorant of the fact that he is practising a deception (which I by no means regard in Relling’s light as pious and charitable), and believes in his own humbug. That is, for the most part; not always. Here and there, as in The Wild Duck, he recognises his error and scourges it severely; and his inmost feeling is so little influenced by his self-deceptive phrase, fit for a weak-willed degenerate, that he involuntarily and unconsciously betrays, in all his productions, his deep abhorrence of men who ‘obey their own law in order to live out their life.’ He punishes Chamberlain Alving in his son, and makes him cursed by his widow because he has ‘lived out his life.’ He imputes it as a crime to Consul Bernick and the merchant Werle that they have ‘lived out their life,’ the former in sacrificing his brother-in-law Johan to protect himself, and for his intrigue with Mrs. Dorf, the actress; and the latter for allowing Ekdal to bear the blame of his fault, and for seducing Gina. He surrounds with an aureole the glorified heads of Rosmer and Rebecca, because they did not ‘live out their life,’ but, on the contrary, ‘died their death,’ if I may put it so; because they obeyed, not ‘their own law,’ but that of others, the universal moral law that annihilated them. Whenever one of his characters acts in accordance with Ibsen’s doctrine, and does what is agreeable to himself regardless of morals and law, he experiences such contrition and self-torment that he is unable to find calm and joy until he has disburdened his conscience by confession and expiation.
‘This living out one’s life’ makes its appearance in Ibsen in the form also of a rigid individualism. The ‘self’ is the only real thing; the ‘I’ must be cherished and developed, as, indeed, Barrès preaches independently of Ibsen. The first duty of every human being is to be just to his ‘I,’ to satisfy its demands, to sacrifice to it every consideration for others. When Nora wishes to abandon her husband, he cries (p. 112):
Only think what people will say about it!