In An Enemy of the People, words of truth are ever coming from the mouths of the Stockmann family: ‘There’s so much falseness both at home and at school,’ declaims their daughter, Petra. ‘At home you mustn’t speak, and at school you have to stand there and lie to the children.... We have to teach many and many a thing we don’t believe ourselves.... If only I could afford it I’d start a school myself, and things should be very different there.’ The courageous maiden quarrels with an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity (p. 255): ‘What I am angry with you for is that you have not acted honestly towards my father. You told him it was only the truth and the good of the community you cared about.... You are not the man you pretend to be. And I shall never forgive you—never!’ ‘The whole of our developing social life,’ cries the father Stockmann in his turn (p. 242), ‘is rooted in a lie.’ And later on (p. 287) ‘Yes, I love my native town so well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie.... All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You’ll poison the whole country in time; you’ll bring it to such a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.’ Now, all this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this fervent worship of truth is only one of the forms under which there appears in Ibsen’s consciousness the mystico-religious obsession of the sacrament of confession, and also, if he were not careful, conformably with his habit, to destroy any too hasty belief in the sincerity of his phraseology by himself ridiculing it. In Gregers Werle he has created the best caricature of his men of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly the same terms as Lona Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but in his mouth the words are intended to excite laughter: ‘And look at this confiding nature, this great child,’ he says of his friend Hjalmar (p. 41). ‘See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under the same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his home, as he calls it, rests upon a lie.... At length I see an object in life.’ This object consists in operating on Hjalmar’s moral cataract. And he does it, too. ‘You are sunk in a poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,’ Gregers says to him (p. 101). ‘You have an insidious disease within you, and you’ve sunk down to die in the dark.... Don’t be afraid; I will try to help you up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.’ And shortly afterwards he says to the father: ‘But Hjalmar I can rescue from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to ruin.’ The scoffer Relling treats no worse than he deserves the idiot who, in fulfilling his ‘mission in life’ disturbs the peace between Hjalmar and his wife, destroys their comfortable home, and drives Hedwig to her death.
Yours is a complicated case ... that troublesome integrity-fever [he says to him—p. 360]....
I’m fostering the life-illusion [literally ‘the life-lie’] in him.
Gregers. Life-illusion? Is that what you said?
Relling. Yes, I said illusion. For illusion, you know, is the stimulating principle.... Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.
Now, what is Ibsen’s real opinion? Is a man to strive for truth, or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with Relling? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions, or, rather, he replies to them affirmatively and negatively with equal ardour and equal poetic power.
Another ‘moral idea’ of Ibsen, about which his choristers chatter most loudly, is that of ‘true marriage.’ It is certainly not easy to discover what his mystic brain conceives by these mysterious words, but it is nevertheless possible to guess it from the hundred obscure notions in his plays. He does not seem to approve of the idea that the woman should regard marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In nearly all his pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony peculiar to him. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life’s unhappiness to the fact that she married the chamberlain for his money—that she sold herself. ‘The sums which I have spent upon the orphanage year by year make up the amount—I have reckoned it up precisely—the amount which made Lieutenant Alving a good match in his day.... It was the purchase-money. I do not choose that money should pass into Oswald’s hands’ (p. 149). In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida sings the same song (p. 139): ‘It could bring nothing but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together.... Yes, we are (doing so), or, at least, we suppress the truth. For the truth ... is, that you came out there and bought me.... I was not a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain—sold myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and so absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the bargain when you came and proposed to provide for me all my life.’ In almost the same words Hedda says (Hedda Gabler, p. 86): ‘And then he would go and make such a tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for me. I did not know why I should not accept it.’ She did not know why; but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final suicide, are the consequence of her having allowed herself to be ‘provided for.’ The regard paid to the ‘being provided for’ became also the lifelong misery of another woman in the same piece—Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally as ‘governess in the house of her future husband.’ She subsequently undertook the management of the household. Then she allowed herself to be married, although ‘everything around him is distasteful to me,’ and ‘we do not possess a thought in common.’ Ibsen condemns the man who marries for money not less than the woman who allows herself to be ‘provided for.’ The cause of Bernick’s moral downfall (The Pillars of Society, p. 56), is chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he loved, but another. ‘It was for no new fancy that I broke with you; it was entirely for the sake of the money.’
Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle to which every rational and moral man will subscribe. But why should one marry? The most reasonable answer can only be, ‘From inclination.’ But Ibsen will have none of this either. The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a love-match. It leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly affirms it (p. 108): ‘You had only seen me and spoken to me a few times. Then you wanted me, and so....’ And then she feels herself a stranger to him, and wishes to leave him. So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted, marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the happiness of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundly unhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich, and pays for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel marries a girl because she pleases him, and as a reward she wishes to quit him and her home. What conclusion is to be drawn from all this? That marriage from prudence is bad, and marriage from love no better? That marriage in general is worth nothing, and should be abolished? That would be at least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen arrives. Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case of Nora, it is reciprocal. Something else is still necessary—the man must become the educator of his wife. He must help her intellectually. He must let her participate in all his concerns, make of her a companion possessing equal rights, and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she always remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no ‘true marriage.’ ‘I have no right to claim my husband wholly and solely for myself,’ Ellida confesses (The Lady from the Sea, P. 57). ‘Why, I, too, live in something from which others are shut out.’ In the same piece Wangel blames himself in this way (p. 130): ‘I ought to have been at once a father to her and a guide; I ought to have done my best to develop and enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that.... I preferred her just as she was.’ In The Pillars of Society Mrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141): ‘For many years I believed that I had at one time possessed you and lost you again. Now I know that I have never possessed you.’ And Lona Hessel draws the moral from this story (p. 97):
And do you never think what she might have been to you—she, whom you chose in my stead?
Bernick. I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what I required.