Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies his ego-mania without giving offence to society. This personage presents himself under the names successively of Torvald Helmer, Consul Bernick, Curate Rörlund, Rector Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster Stockmann, Werle, and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler, always with the same ideas and the same words. In A Doll’s House (p. 104, et seq.), after his wife’s confession, Helmer cries: ‘Oh, what an awful awakening!... No religion, no morality, no sense of duty.... He can publish the whole story; and if he does publish it, perhaps I should be suspected of having been a party to your criminal transactions.... I must try to pacify him in one way or the other. The story must be kept secret, cost what it may.’ In Ghosts Pastor Manders on different occasions expresses himself thus: ‘One is certainly not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and thinks within one’s own four walls.... We must not expose ourselves to false interpretations, and we have no right whatever to give offence to our neighbours.... You go and risk your good name and reputation, and nearly succeed in ruining other people’s reputation into the bargain. It was unspeakably reckless of you to seek refuge with me.... Yes, that is the only thing possible’ (to ‘hush the matter up’) ‘... yes, family life is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such a case as you point to’ (an incestuous union), ‘one can never know.’ Rörlund (The Pillars of Society): ‘See how the family is undermined over there! how a brazen spirit of destruction is attacking the most vital truths!... Of course, a tare now and then springs up among the wheat, alas! but we honestly do our best to weed it out.... Oh, Dina, you can form no conception of the thousand considerations! When a man is placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why—he cannot be too careful.... Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me! Hush! someone is coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the others.... A good book forms a refreshing contrast to what we unhappily see every day in newspapers and magazines.’ Consul Bernick, in the same piece: ‘Just at this time, when I depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press and in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all over the country-side.... These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping at us.... I whose mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t do for me to have my name bespattered in this way.... I must keep my conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression on both the press and the public at large when they see that I set aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its course.’ Kroll, in Rosmersholm: ‘Do you ever see the Radical papers?... But you’ve seen, then, I suppose, how these gentlemen of “the people” have been pleased to treat me? what infamous abuse they’ve dared to heap upon me?’ Werle, in The Wild Duck: ‘Even if, out of attachment to me, she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that——?’ The Burgomaster, in An Enemy of the People: ‘If, perhaps, I do watch over my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the good of the town.... Your statement ... must be kept back for the good of all ... we will do the best we can quietly; but nothing whatever, not a single word, of this unfortunate business must be made public.... And then you have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every possible and impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an idea than you must write at once some newspaper article or a whole pamphlet about it.’ Finally, Hedda Gabler: ‘And so you went off perfectly openly?... But what do you suppose that people will say about you, then?... I so dread a scandal! You should accept for your own sake, or, better still, for the world’s sake.’
If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are read successively, an impression must be formed that they are part of the same rôle; and this impression is correct, for under all the different names there is only one rôle. The same is true of the women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora, unselfishly sacrifice themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel, Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are always the same figure in different guises. The monotony, moreover, extends to minutest details. Rank’s inherited disease is in Oswald’s case only carried further. Nora’s flight is repeated in almost every piece, and in The Wild Duck is travestied in Hjalmar’s departure from his house. One feature of this scene appears word for word in all the réchauffés of it:
Nora. Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage everything in the house far better than I do.
Ellida. If I do go ... I haven’t a key to give up, an order to give.... I am absolutely rootless in your house, etc.
In A Doll’s House, the heroine, who has settled her account with life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe, makes Rank play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she dances to it. In Hedda Gabler, the heroine is heard ‘suddenly playing a wild dance’ before she shoots herself. Rosmer says to Rebecca, when the latter makes known her wish to die: ‘No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do what she dared.’ The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to commit suicide: ‘Oh, you don’t frighten me! An elegant spoilt lady like you.... People don’t do things of that sort.’ Brack says, in response to Hedda Gabler’s outburst: ‘Rather die! That’s what people say, but nobody does it!’ In much the same words Helmer reproaches his wife Nora with having sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor Manders upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick, and Rebecca from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle’s crime was the seduction of the maidservant Gina. Alving’s crime was the seduction of his own maidservant. This pitiable and imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this impotence of his indolent brain to wash out the imprint of an idea once painfully elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of names for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under the influence of a reminiscence. In A Doll’s House we have Helmer; in The Wild Duck, Hjalmar; in The Pillars of Society, Hilmar, Mrs. Bernick’s brother.
Thus Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees, at each shaking of the cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this toy. But adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always the same, inserted haphazard, and united into symmetrical figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not only to Ibsen’s plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for thirty years he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic patterns, these are his obsessions. These have existed in his own diseased mind, and have not sprung from observation of the world’s drama. The pretended ‘realist’ knows nothing of real life. He does not comprehend it; he does not even see it, and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions, ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manufacturing cannon is to take a tube and pour molten metal round it. Ibsen proceeds in a similar way with his poems. He has a thesis—more accurately, some anarchistic folly; this is the tube. It is now only a question of enveloping this tube with the metal of life’s realities. But that lies beyond Ibsen’s power. At best he occasionally finds some bits of worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box, by rummaging among dust-heaps; but this small quantity of metal does not suffice for a cannon. Where Ibsen makes strenuous efforts to produce a picture of actual contemporaneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his experience.
Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this. It sinks below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber and Sir John Lubbock have recorded incidents of this sort in their observations of colonies of ants. The small features pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole life have never formed a clearer thought than: ‘How can I get hold of a bottle of brandy?’ or ‘How can I make myself interesting to men?’ The sole characteristic distinguishing these Lövborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas, do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to require strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the obtaining of a position in a bank (A Doll’s House); their catastrophes, that one no longer believes in the articles of their creed (Rosmersholm); the loss of an appointment as physician at a watering-place (An Enemy of the People); the raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnal péché de jeunesse (The Pillars of Society); the frightful crimes darkening, like a thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their social circle are an intrigue with a maidservant (Ghosts, The Wild Duck); a liaison with an itinerant music-hall singer (An Enemy of the People); the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (The Wild Duck); the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good dinner (Hedda Gabler). It sometimes happens to me to pass a half-hour in the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter and play of the little ones. One day the children by accident saw the arrest of someone in the street. Although their attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant spectacle, they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found them full of the great event, and I became the auditor of the following dialogue:
Matilda (aged three years). Why did they put the gentleman in prison?
Richard (five years old, very dignified and sententious). It wasn’t a gentleman; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was wicked.
Matilda. What had he done then?