In this same Lady from the Sea, Ellida renounces her project of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the ‘stranger,’ as soon as Wangel says ‘with aching heart’: ‘Now you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.’ She remains with Wangel. She chooses him. ‘Whence came the change?’ asks Wangel and the reader with him. ‘Ah, don’t you understand,’ Ellida gushingly replies, ‘that the change came—was bound to come—when I could choose in freedom!’ (p. 141). This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete contrast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives her her freedom; but she was still freer on the first occasion, because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not need to begin by setting her free. As little was external coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently after marriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She has come into no property since her marriage, so far as we know from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to explain the change? There is none. It exists in the confused thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself definitively; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy—experimental marriage.
We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. In Ghosts Oswald Alving’s disease is represented as a chastisement for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love. Now, Oswald’s state is the consequence of a complaint which may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know better than that. They know hundreds—nay, thousands—of cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen’s drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be a monster of immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an insane son; and his son could be insane without more culpability on the part of the father than is the case with all men who have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother the intermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of Oswald a panegyric on concubinage—one of the most incredible things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ‘What are they to do?’ replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ‘A poor young artist—a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to get married.’ I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ‘free union,’ and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen’s infantine fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum, very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow to the girl he has persuaded to live with him; and religious marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of the civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something agreeable without undertaking any serious duties; or, finally, in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least, excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love, and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their intention to be faithful to each other unto death.
But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying, and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ‘living out one’s life.’ But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of her husband? That all should remain chaste and pure, an idea worked out by Bjornson in his Glove? No. She is led by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and the law are bad. ‘Oh, that perpetual law and order!’ she exclaims (p. 154); ‘I often think it is that which does all the mischief here in the world.... I can endure all this constraint and cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work my way out to freedom.’ What in the world has Alving’s story to do with ‘law and order?’ and how does ‘freedom’ enter into this Credo? What connection with the piece have the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into applause. In Tahiti neither ‘order’ nor ‘morals’ reign in the sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties have all the ‘freedom’ to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ‘work her way out,’ and the men so ‘live out their lives’ that ships’ officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. And in that very region Chamberlain Alving’s disease is so widespread that, according to Ibsen’s medical theory, all the young Tahitians must be Oswalds.
But this is a constant habit of Ibsen’s, evidenced in all his pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ‘I don’t know what religion is,’ Nora says in the well-known scene where she leaves her husband (p. 114). ‘... I know nothing but what our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true.... I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I thought they were; but I can’t convince myself that they are right.’ Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her father’s name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39): ‘The laws inquire little into motives.’ The whole of this scene, in view of which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play, and does not originally spring from it. If Nora wishes to abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. In The Pillars of Society Bernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces his avowal with the words (p. 110): ‘Let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum,’ etc. ‘Speak for yourself, Bernick, speak for yourself,’ one might well call out to the old wind-bag, who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual case. ‘I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made within the last few days,’ exclaims Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, ‘the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ That may in itself be true; but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato’s republic it might happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general proposition that ‘our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ In Rosmersholm, Brendel says in an obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with foreboding (p. 23): ‘We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.’ This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow in the eye in the place where it occurs, for Rosmersholm has no connection with any definite period of time; and it is not necessary to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas—to any age or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.
We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who wish to pick a quarrel: ‘Sir, why did you look at me in that way?’ ‘Pardon me, I did not look at you.’ ‘What! you say, then, that I lie?’ ‘I said nothing of the sort.’ ‘You give me the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.’ This is Ibsen’s method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead, however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naïve farces of our fathers. Cleanse Ibsen’s dramas of these pasted-on phrases, and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as ‘modern’ productions; there will remain only a tissue of absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures, not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis—i.e., some anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world without seeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself. In contradiction to the saying of the poet, ‘All that is human is alien to him,’ and his own ‘I’ alone occupies him and absorbs his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem wherein he says, ‘Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day over one’s own self.’[342]
The ‘ghost in the heart and brain’ is the obsessions and impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is nothing but a ‘judgment day’ of the poet over himself, cannot be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with distinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the chief events and central characters are always astonishingly absurd and alien to all the realities of the world.
It is in Brand that Ibsen’s absurdity apparently achieves its greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiterated ad nauseam that this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard’s crazy ‘Either-Or.’ Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ‘all or nothing,’ and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. What he especially understands by these high-sounding words the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, however, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness, and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the following wonderful information (p. 151): ‘How long will the struggle last?’ (viz., the climbing, for there is no other struggle in this Act). ‘It lasts until life’s end. Until you have sacrificed all; until you are freed from your compact; until that which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.’ (What this is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ‘Until every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from the All or Nothing. And your sacrifices? All the gods which with you take the place of the eternal God; the shining golden chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid slothfulness. The reward of victory? Unity of will, activity of faith, pureness of soul.’ Naturally on listening to this ranting the good people ‘come to their senses and go home,’ but the lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want to pant uphill in order to ‘wish for something unswervingly,’ to attain to ‘all or nothing,’ and to arrive at ‘unity of will.’ For it is ‘the all’ which seems to inhabit mountains; not merely freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (‘Liberty dwells in the mountains,’ Schiller has said.)
And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling impulse,[343] who with furious passion are continually and reiteratingly talking of ‘the goal’ which they wish to attain, but who neither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is, nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his inflexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.
Ibsen’s absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an idea than the ‘tra-la-la’ sung to a song of which one has forgotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest of function[344] in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are continuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of profundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recognises them as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import. Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in consternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of their table companions at the habitual café. I will give some illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.
Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated between intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis of the centres of ideation.