Ibsen

I

BY a melancholy coincidence, each of the two men who represented in the second half of the nineteenth century pure intelligence in its proudest and most independent form ceased, before the close of their mortal life, to enjoy the light of thought. It is probable that both Nietzsche and Ibsen suffered the penalty due to excessive tension of cerebral effort. Each succumbed at last to one of those conditions of decay from which in their maturity each would have rebelled with the greatest arrogance and horror. There is something strangely humiliating to our vanity, something infinitely bewildering to our science, in this paradox, by which the most active is seen to become the most helpless. The evolutions of human energy are past finding out, and our physicians have no formula by which they can explain why the commonplace yokel occasionally lingers to the age of a hundred years, with his intelligence, such as it is, unimpaired, while the authors of Also sprach Zarathustra and of Peer Gynt sink into senility and silence before their natural strength should be abated. Is it permitted to believe that a certain effort of the will, a certain persistent determination to penetrate and comprehend, does sap the intellectual force ? May there be cases in which the eagle’s eye, as he gazes at the sun, grows veiled with shadow, while his brain reels into stupefaction ? Perhaps the conjecture savors of rhetoric, and before these vast inconsistencies of life we do best to be reverently silent.

It is not necessary, perhaps, in reviewing the career of Ibsen to seek far afield for the sources of his ultimate physical exhaustion. If we consider the whole of his life-story, we are struck by the element of struggle which colors all but the few triumphant years of it. He was the poet of revolt, and from the earliest expansion of his individuality, he found himself in opposition. Most of us slip pleasantly enough along the tide of life by relinquishing to fashion and habit the majority of the problems which occupy mankind. Even those of us who cultivate a certain originality are content to be original in one limited direction, or within a restricted province of affairs. Few of us could endure the strain of universal opposition to the world around us. During the greater part of his life, Ibsen accepted and endured this strain. He was in the position of a man who finds himself in a lunatic asylum, and whose whole effort is concentrated on preserving his sanity intact in the midst of a world of illusion and absurdity. This is what European society, and in particular Norwegian society, appeared to Ibsen from about 1855 to 1885. He was opposed to everything; he felt himself to be a perfectly normal individual in danger of being swept away by a leaping, foaming flood of falsity and ignorance. He had not merely to try and save a few other individuals from the mass of folly, but he had the infinite strain and anxiety of trying to keep himself from any unintentional conformity with the mass.

It is not to do injustice to his positive value and merit to say that in this excessive tension, this rigidity of revolt, Ibsen betrayed the fact that to him society meant a relatively small and positively provincial segment of the great European body. It is impossible to believe that the struggle would have been so vehement if the fatherland had been France, for instance, or even Italy. It would have been less in a society still more rudimentary than his own, — such, for instance, as that of Russia. Ibsen was a product of civilization, which Tolstoi was not, but he was the product of an impoverished and remote civilization, of a people suffering from that radical inaptitude for receiving the truth which comes from knowing too much and yet not enough. Before 1870, — when the war in Europe, with its vast reverberations, revolutionized the spiritual life of Norway, — it was a country of timid thoughts and vapid appreciations. There could have been no odder irony than that such a man as Ibsen should come out of such a country as was the unreformed Norway, the country of moral and intellectual twilight, even as we see it portrayed in Welhaven’s despairing sonnets. There the spiritual soil was dense and dry; nothing could be done to vitalize it until, as Ibsen said so late as 1879, the ploughshare ran deep into its substance, and let in light and air by breaking up the old conventions and smashing the hypocrisies to bits. But what a strain, to the temper and to the heart, to believe one’s self created to be the plough to till that harsh field from dawn to dark!

He felt it to be absolutely necessary to put a sensible distance between Norway and himself, and this is the secret of that voluntary exile of so many years, which is such a curious element in Ibsen’s biography. Like Dante and Byron and Alfieri, he contemplates his country from a distance, unable to breathe the air of what he counts its moral dejection. Ibsen could not, at the height of his passion, conceive that other spirits, no less free than his, could endure an atmosphere in which he was blighted. “Come out from among them, carissimo!” he wrote from Rome in 1867 to Björnson in Norway; “to be at a distance is to get everything in focus.” And he compared the people of Christiania to the inhabitants of Weimar, “Goethe’s worst public.” He writes in almost exactly the same tone to Magdalene Thoresen, the aged novelist, and to Kristian Elster, the youthful poet. It is like the cry of an evangelist, warning the few just dwellers in a City of the Plain to come out quickly and be separate. When at last he was persuaded to return to the North, he could not endure being watched by “cold and stupid Norwegian eyes gazing out of the windows” in the streets of Christiania. There is something painfully sensitive, like the wincing of a wounded animal that growls, in Ibsen’s attitude to Norway during these long years; and it is curious that, if he is severe in his dramas, he is far more so in his more private utterances, those, namely, in his poems and his letters.

Ibsen was directly hostile to all that made up popular feeling in the third quarter of the century. That was an epoch in which all things were looked for from the State, when the individual was expected to shrink back into the ranks and be lost, when the combinations of politics, the extension of trade, the development and discipline of military systems, were of paramount interest to Europe. In the midst of all this rarification, Ibsen, the most impassioned of individualists, found it impossible to breathe. He wrote to Magdalene Thoresen, in 1868, that nothing but a great national disaster would make Norway a country in winch a man could live in happiness. He compared such an one as himself to a hunted creature, fleeing from its enemies and asking for nothing more than a solitary place in which to lie down and die. If he had not Rome to shelter him, he had said in 1865, — Rome with its “unspeakable sense of peace,” —Rome “that has no political ambition, no commercial spirit, no military dreams,” — Rome where alone on earth “there is beauty and health and truth and quietude,” — he knew not wdiere in this troubled Europe he could hide his head and endure the wickedness of men.

Against this he was steadily fighting all the time. When Rome became the capital of Italy, and so no longer a place for him, Ibsen folded his tents and went over the Alps to Dresden. Here, in his Saxon refuge, he took up, as before, his unceasing battle against all the political and social conditions which were then acceptable in Norway, carrying on with vigor his self-constituted duty as statssatyrikus, or public hangman, consistently and vigorously lashing those who were in power. In 1872, reviewing what he had accomplished, he admitted a faint satisfaction in having made the political leaders of his country a little ashamed of themselves and Norway not a little ashamed of them. But he was then only on the threshold of his activity; if he had Brand and Peer Gynt behind him, Ghosts and The Enemy of the People and A Doll’s House were still undreamed of. Until, in 1891, he made his peace with Norway, he continued indefatigable in attack. It was the form his patriotism took, the bitterness of one who loves and sees the beloved descending into paths unworthy of her fame and glory.

Like Euripides, with whom it will be found that Ibsen had curious affinities, the Norwegian poet was essentially an “agitator of the people.” He was born to stir the pools, to trouble the sleeping waters. But his attitude of revolt was one which was so marked that it could not preclude some manifestations of character which laid themselves open to reproach. If Christiania, in the seventies, had possessed an Aristophanes, a brilliant and unsparing defender of the old ideas in new forms, it is easy to suppose that the emphasis and subtlety of Ibsen would have offered him matchless opportunities of ridicule. The intense personal individualism of the dramatist offered an easy bait to satire, for it expressed itself in a wide variety of ways. A man does not conceive all his contemporaries to be in the wrong, without himself straining, at various points, the code of what is graceful and becoming. The fierceness of Ibsen took all manner of literary forms; it ran the whole gamut between the lofty rage of Brand’s sermons, and the shrill note of private pique which animates At Port Said. His Muse speaks now like a sibyl and now like a slighted nursery governess. In the world of spiritual matters Ibsen was a martyr, but he was also a tyrant, and he was too confident that everybody else was wrong not to trample upon his opponents when he found they were beginning to agree with him. We shall not do justice to Ibsen, as the supreme poetical “agitator” of his age, unless we give a glance to this aspect of his career.

In the absence of an Aristophanes, the comic press in Scandinavia did what justice it could to certain phases of the character of Ibsen, particularly as it was manifested after his misunderstandings with Norway were at an end, and he had become the cynosure of every curious eye in his daily stroll along Carl Johansgade. I believe that the caricatures of Ibsen will be eagerly collected one of these days by those who are anxious to comprehend the effect he produced on his contemporaries. He “lent himself,” as people say, to caricature, and this is an art which has had brilliant proficients in each of the three Scandinavian countries. Ibsen, glum and surly amid the frenzied plaudits of his admirers at a banquet; Ibsen, dressed in the height, and beyond the height, of fashion, brushing up his whiskers by the help of a top-hat like a mirror; Ibsen, turning his back on a deputation of adoring ladies, leaving them planted, in short, upon their knees; these and a hundred more, in their amusing exaggeration, testified to the violence of his individuality, to the public consistency of his self-esteem. But, above all others, there recurs to my memory a caricature of some fifteen years ago, in a Danish paper, professing to give a picture of the king of Denmark granting an audience to the Norwegian poet. Christian IX, languid, affable, and immensely tall, bends graciously to receive Ibsen, who, represented as not more than three feet high, struts toward him through two files of flunkies, his bushy head set high in air, and every inch of his body, from the topmost crest of hair to the tips of the tiny varnished boots, vibrating with gratified importance. In these absurd and entertaining designs . future critics will find valuable material for completing their investigation into the real nature of this extraordinary man of genius, who felt strong enough, in the might of his enormous self-consciousness, to take the civilization of his country in his teeth, and to shake it as a terrier shakes a rat.

II

If we set ourselves to see what external circumstances had to do with the development of this unique temperament, we are struck by the unity of the design of Providence. Everything combined to make Ibsen what he became. The forces which surrounded his early years were of a nature to destroy an individuality less vigorous than his, but they led and strengthened him. The spirit of Ibsen throve upon hardship as Mithridates was said to have flourished and grown fat upon poison. In reviewing the life of Ibsen, the first point which strikes us is that he proceeded from a severe puritanical family. The house in Skien, where he was born in 1828, was burned down a few years ago. I once expressed to Ibsen my sympathy for the inhabitants of Skien, thus deprived of their only hostage to immortality. He replied, “Don’t pity them for losing my birthplace; they did n’t deserve to have it.” (Somewhat the same sentiment was expressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, about his own birthplace in Cambridge.) To this house, so properly destroyed, to this town of Skien, so predisposed for humiliation, Ibsen was always a stranger. He left the father and mother whom he scarcely knew, the town which he hated, the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surly dunce, in his fifteenth year. We find him next, with an apron round his middle, and a pestle in his hand, pounding drugs in a little apothecary’s shop in Grimstad. What Blackwood’s so basely insinuated of Keats, — “back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters, pills, and ointmentboxes,”— inappropriate to the author of Endymion, was strictly true of the author of Peer Gynt.

Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to Grimstad. It is a marvelous object-lesson on the development of genius. For six whole years (from 1844 to 1850), — and those years the most important of all in the moulding of character and talent, — one of the most original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen for a century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills, and plasters. Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing at all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and it looks out into the east wind, over a dark bay, dotted with naked rocks. No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfect uniformity of little red houses where nobody seems to be doing anything; in Ibsen’s time there are said to have been about three hundred of these apathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for six interminable years, one of the acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in braying ipecacuanha and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary’s counter. In a document of extreme interest, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of his commentators, — the preface to the second (1876) edition of Catilina, —Ibsen has described what the external influences were which found him in the wretchedness of Grimstad; they were the revolution of February, 1848, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote a series of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him to take up arms for the help of Denmark; and of nights, when all his duties were over at last and the shop shut up, he would creep to the garret where he slept, and dream himself fighting at the centre of the world, instead of lost on its extreme circumference. And here he began his first drama, the opening lines of which,— “ I must, I must; a voice is crying to me From my soul’s depth, and I will follow it,” — might be taken as the epigraph of Ibsen’s whole lifework. In one of his letters to Georg Brandes, he has noted, with that clairvoyance which marks all his utterances about himself, the “full-blooded egotism” which developed in him during his years of mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of his satiric dramas, we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its intolerable laws and ordinances, modified a little, expanded sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always there. To the last, the images and the rebellions which were burned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over again to his readers.

What began in darkness at Skien, and went on in humiliation at Grimstad, only took fresh forms of distress when he broke away in 1850 to Christiania. When some one asked him, long afterwards, what elements had supported his youth, Ibsen answered, “Doubt and despondency,”— tvivl og mismod, tvivl og mismod ! This is remarkable as being the exact opposite of the ordinary poetic philosophy, as we find it laid down, for instance, in Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence, where the “happy Child of Earth” collects in youth a store of joy and genial faith, to serve against that inevitable winter when he must be invaded by “solitude,distress, and pain of heart.” The idea that the Poet, as a species of dormouse, stores nuts of joy against a chilly day, is common to the optimism of modern literature. Ibsen, preëminently, is not the dupe of it, and it is to a youth of despondency and privation that he felt he owed a manhood of independent vigor. His childhood oppressed by poverty and the absence of affection, his youth by a vain struggle for recognition and the burden of debts, his manhood by solitude in exile and bitter detraction at home, — the lot of Ibsen seems at first sight one of the least enviable in literary history. But all these deadly troubles proved merely cordials and elixirs upon which his genius flourished, spreading through their darkness into the light and air. It is an instance which may well cause a determinist to question the wisdom of his formula, since, if ever there was presented to us a character which throve in unceasing resistance to the motives acting upon it, it was surely that of Ibsen.

In the history of Danish literature, which had up to the close of the eighteenth century been the literature of Norway also, Ibsen found a prototype for many of his revolts against convention and for much of his temper of resistance. This was the encyclopaedic genius Holberg, who represents at its highest point of development the Scandinavian mind during the eighteenth century. The relation of Ibsen to Holberg was not unlike that of M. Anatole France to Voltaire. Holberg had striven to create a sentiment of personal freedom in the society of his day. Like Ibsen, he had hated a political liberty which was not the outward and visible sign of a liberty of heart and brain. He held that it was in isolation, in defiance, that a man learned to preserve all that was noblest and best in his individual nature. Between Holberg and Ibsen there lay a hundred years of what was called, and what no doubt deserved to be called, progress of a material and economical kind; but the advance had been made in the interests of the citizen as a unit in the mass, not in those of a man as such. Ibsen was no assiduous reader, and at no time a great lover of books, but he could break off his meditations at any time to reread, with rapture, the rich comedies of Holberg. In that writer he found characteristics which appealed to him as did none others in modern literature. It is unfortunate that this theme can hardly be pursued with much profit to Anglo-Saxon readers, for no interpretation of the works of the great Danish writer has hitherto been attempted in English.

Ibsen agreed with La Rochefoucauld in seeing the love of self to be the fundamental principle of all activity. The long and weary years in Skien,in Grimstad, in Bergen, while they seemed to pass over his character without moulding it in any way, had this eminent result: they emphasized and deepened his extreme intellectual reliance on himself. No one has felt less than Ibsen did the need of having a helper, a spirit of sympathy, walking at his side. When he was twenty-one, on his arrival in Christiania, he formed a close friendship with a peasantschoolmaster, Aasmund Vinje, who was ten years Ibsen’s senior. Vinje, who was a poet of independent merit and a vigorous ironical thinker, was the first person of cultivated intellect whom Ibsen had met. He was a revolutionist, a skeptic, he, too, an “agitator of the people,” and it is said that in Peer Gynt we have a portrait of him. They became close friends for a while, and the biographers of the greater poet have labored to discover why Ibsen, so youthful, so inexperienced, at the most malleable age, did not succumb to the fascination of Vinje. They overlook the fact that, from the very first, it was impossible for Ibsen to succumb to any influence. He could accompany Vinje, he could enjoy his conversation and his society, but the moment that there was a difference of opinion between them, it was Vinje whose attitude was modified, not Ibsen.

Again, in the very interesting and important matter of Ibsen’s lifelong relations with Björnson, a subject of which there was practically nothing comprehensible until the publication of Ibsen’s Letters in 1904, we see the natural result of the vicinity of a straight line to an undulating one. In private amiability, Björnson is shown to have exceeded Ibsen; his generosity of spirit and of act is charming. But Björnson, forever altering his immediate point of view, forever yielding to new spiritual attractions and grasping at new public aims, crosses and recrosses the path of Ibsen, with the result that shock upon shock of private emotion follows. It is very interesting — and this matter is sure to occupy more and more closely the attention of literary historians — that both these men, the summits of intellectual attainment in their time and country, had the same desire to analyze and create “a royal soul” in which the ideal of Norwegian manhood should culminate. The place which the idea of a king takes in the works of Ibsen and Björnson is highly interesting to us, who have just seen Haakon VII, amid the frenzied shouts of a nation united as it was never united before, take his seat on the throne of a wholly independent Norway. But Björnson’s private friendship with Ibsen throughout all this period of their striving toward a common point depended, with meteorological precision, on Björnson’s agreement with Ibsen. Ibsen never budged, never resigned a point. If Pollux started on a new tack, he lost the friendship of his mighty twin; but it was no part of the business of Castor to pursue him on his course, or to persuade him back to unity.

III

The temperament which we have attempted to indicate, absolutely self-convinced, nourished upon questioning and despondency, led forth slowly into unflinching exposure of what it deems to be error, feebleness, want of consistent activity, is one which is likely in no case to develop quickly, and which, translated into the field of literature, depends for its ultimate reception on the degree to which its attitude is accepted by the most liberated spirits of the next age as being just and honest and wholesome. As late as 1879, Ibsen, no whit moved to suppose that his own position was a false one, still despaired of the redemption of Norway. His words are striking enough to awaken the most indifferent. To a generation absolutely wrapped up in moral and religious Podsnapery, to whom a new thought could no more penetrate than a breeze of spring to a Lapp through his skins and his oils, Ibsen says: “So long as a nation considers it more important to build chapels than theatres, so long as it is more willing to support a mission to the Zulus than to endow an art-museum, so long we perceive that it lies bound hand and foot by dark monkish traditions of the Middle Ages, which stifle its breath and render null its very being.” Any notion of levity suggested by the prominence given here to theatres will be removed at once if we consider that the stage was regarded by Ibsen, all through his career, not as a means of entertainment in any trivial sense, but as the platform from which most popularly and vividly and convincingly a man of genius can proclaim the ethical faith which is in him.

Here, again, how close is the likeness to Euripides! To the ordinary poetdramatist, as to Sophocles, the scene of a romantic play is miraculous and remote, drowned in a haze of imagination. But to the author of An Enemy of the People, as to the author of Orestes or Hercules Furens, the actual conditions of the world about us take a full poetic gravity, withoutceasing to be absolutely modern, and if the appeal to moral truth is more direct, more poignant, more “agitating,” in the theatre than in the conventicle, it is the former and not the latter which calls for public encouragement and support. And the poet must definitely say so, even though his words sound scandalous.

The agitation produced by Brand and by Peer Gynt, however, had scarcely amounted to scandal, and at the worst there was a large and influential body of readers in the North who approved of the direct appeal to the conscience of the country which was made in those famous lyrical dramas. Ten years and more passed, during which time Ibsen was gradually accepted as an enthusiastic poet of reform, who might “go too far” in his outspoken diatribes, but whose heart was in the right place. I myself, in 1872 and later, heard this opinion expressed in Norway by country pastors and people of that class, who read Brand with a shudder and Peer Gynt and Love’s Comedy with a somewhat exasperated smile, but who supposed that these were the wild oats of a dramatist who would settle down, and be as other successful dramatists are. But this tame kind of acceptation did not disarm Ibsen in the slightest degree. He thought that the sleeper had turned in his slumber and had muttered, but that he had gone to sleep again. The complacency of Scandinavian thought maddened him, whether to himself it might happen to come bringing blessings or curses. The lesson of Brand was taken as being a religious, and even a Protestant one; it leveled itself down to an exhortation to Norse ministers of religion to be more zealous, and less engaged with their personal comfort. And all Norwegians, who were not in orders, smiled, and said that the lesson was well deserved.

It seemed to the satirist that he had failed. He said that it was a mere accident that his hero was a priest; he might just as well have been a politician or a sculptor. (We may note, in passing, that, long afterwards, he dealt precisely with sculptors and with politicians.) He even thought of taking Galileo as a subject, and of making him die sooner than admit to a hypocritical world that the sun goes round the earth. He thought of Holberg, as he always did in an intellectual crisis, and dreamed of a new Erasmus Montanus. In some way or other he must rouse the slumbering conscience, by some fierce imaginative pang, some stab of the pen into the very vitals. He made several efforts to show that he made no truce, that he was still carrying war into the enemy’s quarters, and these efforts produced their measure of “agitation.” But nothing stabbed home, nothing forced the army of obscurantism to pause in its measured retreat, and face him, if only for a moment, with a shriek of rage and pain, so completely as Ghosts.

The production of this amazing play marks a crisis in the history of the modern drama. For the first time, the most indulgent were obliged to perceive that Ibsen’s aim was not to produce a more or less satirical entertainment, but to stagger the national conscience by presenting to it an absolutely momentous dilemma. It is needless to revive the memory of the sensation Ghosts produced, the halfheartedness with which even Ibsen’s best European admirers were inclined to receive it, the terrific clatter of a blind and foolish press. If we want a sign of the progress liberty of discussion has made since 1882, we may simply compare what responsible criticism says of Ghosts today with what it said then. But the curious thing is that Ibsen himself, who had been surprised at the comparative calmness with which his ever growing public had accepted Julian the Apostate and A Doll’s House, was taken aback by the scandal which Ghosts created. He paused for a moment, as one pauses if a gun is fired at one’s ear, but in a moment he had recovered his equanimity. He rejoiced to find that he had not exaggerated the moral decrepitude of the masses. Even Björnson failed him, but he did not care. He wrote to Brandes: “Björnson says, the majority is always right. And as a practical politician he is bound to say so. But it is inevitable that I should say, the minority is always right.” His audacity had divided from the dwindling company of the wise all those “men of stagnation” who thought to avoid coming to any logical conclusion by attaching themselves, in their moral mediocrity, to the safe and central party who called themselves Liberals. He was rid of them at last; Ghosts had sent them twittering to their hiding-places, and the poet sat down to write what is perhaps the very strongest of all his studies of life, his magnificent Enemy of the People. Here, with more complete lucidity than anywhere else, and under the most transparent of allegories, is written down Ibsen’s attitude to the world of selfish reservation and vain pretense that he saw around him. Stockmann is Ibsen himself, in the guise of a fierce monk of the Thebaid, as he strides into the lassitude of Alexandria with a goatskin round his loins.

The theme of Brand had been the necessity of renunciation in every sincere human effort after an absolute moral idea. That humanity was sure to fail, the poet saw, but he still thought that it might fail nobly. But as he advanced in experience, his pessimism grew upon him. He came to the conclusion that the moral effort is bound to fail, basely pressed out of place by the omnipresence of conventionality. In A Doll’s House — and there is no passage in Ibsen’s writings which shows a more cruel insight into the weakness of mankind — the central ethical interest surrounds the attitude of Helmer before and after the arrival of the letter in which Krogstad abandons his persecution of Nora. Here Ibsen displays, with irresistible skill, the powerlessness of a modern man to accept moral ideas solely on their own merits. When Helmer is assured that his own reputation is not to suffer, instantly, almost automatically, his anger falls, and his indignation with the erring Nora ceases. It has not been the offense itself, but the social punishment, which has affected him. This is an exposure of the vulgarity of individuals; in The Enemy of the People we see gibbeted the grosser vulgarity of crowds. Finally, The Wild Duck, that mysterious and singular poem, seems to involve the whole race, the reforming minority with the stagnating majority, in one savage denunciation of the degeneracy of man.

From that point, twenty years ago, there came a softer influence over the genius of Ibsen. With Rosmersholm there appeared the element of symbol, in which, while retaining to the full the strenuous examination of conscience, the severity of the test was a little reduced, and an element of the purely poetic admitted. It should never be forgotten that Ibsen is primarily a poet by profession. The works of his early manhood are matchless in the profusion of their melody and the ingenuity of their versification. But in writing the five great prose dramas at which we have just briefly glanced, actual sesthetic beauty seemed to the author of no avail, and he abandoned it. In the five subsequent masterpieces (and even in When we Dead Awaken, which is a work of physical decadence) the element of beauty is restored. It is most evenly suffused, perhaps, in The Lady from the Sea and Master-Builder Solness; but the last act of John Gabriel Borkman, and the entire symbolism on which Rosmersholm and Little Eyolf rest, are full of it. Hedda Gabler remains, where it is not paradoxical to see beauty rather in the exquisite, the almost perfect, technical harmony of the construction, than in anything in the subject matter of the piece itself.

Throughout, his career, Ibsen was accused of encouraging ugliness, both in the subjects and in the manner of his work. This charge has, I think, to be faced, and is not met by a mere negative. The truth seems to me to be this. In his earlier works, for a judgment on which some knowledge of the Dano-Norwegian language is indispensable, Ibsen cultivated formal beauty to the height of his skill. The play called The Banquet at Solhaug, which he published in 1856, has never been translated into English, and is entirely unknown to those who cannot approach the original. It is essentially a youthful and a hyper-romantic production, so full of youth that the dialogue breaks into rhymed dancing measures as if against its will. There are characters in it who cannot appear on the stage but the metre leaps into rhyme at their approach. This is not an Ibsen to which the charge of ugliness can be attached. Nor is there any feature of the sagadramas more notable than the sculptural beauty of the prose in which they are written, nor of the trilogy which began in Love’s Comedy more prominent than the nimbleness of fancy and the adroit variety of appropriate metrical effect.

But there came a moment when Ibsen felt constrained to abandon the principles of æsthetic beauty. The reasons which led him to take a step which seemed so suicidal were clearly set forth in a now famous letter, addressed to myself (January 15, 1874). He explained that he wished to divest himself of every rag of the old ideal romanticism, to descend to the common speech of mortals, and leave the gods to talk verse on their Olympus. His view is now generally understood, and needs not to be repeated here. He desired to come close down to average human nature, and everybody admits that by doing so he obtained for his work enormous advantage in vitality, novelty, and sharpness of touch. We should all have been inestimably the losers if he had taken the foolish advice I gave him in 1874, and had written Julian the Apostate in blank verse. His new theory was amply justified by his success. At the same time, it is to miss the point of his sacrifice to argue that nothing was relinquished. If we speak merely of beauty, — beauty of form, beauty of fancy, beauty of symbol, — there was a sacrifice which, to a poet so exquisitely organized as Ibsen was, must have been immense. The charge of ugliness, if it is brought against Ghosts and The Wild Duck, has to be admitted. These dramas have admirable qualities, but beauty is not among them.

But in the dramas of his third period, the lost element of beauty triumphantly reappeared. Ibsen did not return to verse, and undoubtedly he was wise. His lyrical faculty had probably declined with age, while his peculiar prose was an instrument which he had now learned to practice upon to perfection. There were no metrical ornaments in the later plays, but the poet contrived to flood them with an atmosphere of beauty. The Lady from the Sea seems drowned in a golden blaze of afternoon light, like a Cuyp; Little Eyolf is set against a background of woodland and water, as dark and lustrous as a Buysdael. It was as though the dramatist felt that his harshest work of mere diagnosis was over, that he had taken the blunt facts of physiology enough into consideration. His life’s work would not be fully performed unless he made a second appeal to the imagination, and salved some of the wounds which he had made by his satire. So he permitted his real nature as a poet to reassert itself, and symbolic charm resumed its place in his work; thus, as future criticism cannot fail to perceive more and more clearly, rounding that work to its final orbic fullness.

IV

Having accustomed ourselves to regard Ibsen as a disturbing and revolutionizing force, which met with the utmost resistance at the outset, and was gradually accepted before the close of his career, we may try to define what the nature of his revolt was, and what it was, precisely, that he attacked. It may be roughly said that what peculiarly roused the animosity of Ibsen was the character which has become stereotyped in one order of ideas, good in themselves but gradually outworn by use, and which cannot admit ideas of a new kind. Ibsen meditated upon the obscurantism of the old regime until he created figures like Rosmer, in whom the characteristics of that school are crystallized. From the point of view which would enter sympathetically into the soul of Ibsen and look out on the world from his eyes, there is no one of his plays more valuable than Rosmersholm. It dissects the decrepitude of ancient formulas, it surveys the ruin of ancient faiths. The curse of heredity lies upon Rosmer, who is highly intelligent up to a certain point, but who can go no farther than intelligence. Even if he is persuaded that a new course of action would be salutary, he cannot move, — he is bound in invisible chains. It is useless to argue with Rosmer; his reason accepts the line of logic, but he simply cannot, when it comes to action, cross the bridge where Beate threw herself into the torrent.

But Ibsen had not the ardor of the fighting optimist. He was one who “doubted clouds would break,” who dreamed, since “right was worsted, wrong would triumph.” With Robert Browning he had but this one thing in common, that both were fighters, both “held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,” but the dark fatalism of the Norwegian poet was in other things in entire opposition to the sunshiny hopefulness of the English one. Browning and Ibsen alike considered that the race must be reformed periodically or it would die. The former anticipated reform as cheerily as the sower expects harvest. Ibsen had no such happy certainty. He was convinced of the necessity of breaking up the old illusions, of the imperative call for revolt, but his faith wavered as to the success of the new movements. The old order, in its resistance to all change, is very strong. It may be shaken, but it is the work of a blind Samson, and no less, to bring it rattling to the ground. In Rosmersholm all the modern thought, all the vitality, all the lucidity belong to Rebecca, but the decrepit formulas are stoutly entrenched. In the end it is not the new idea which conquers; it is the antique house, with its traditions, its avenging vision of white horses, which breaks the too-clairvoyant Rebecca.

This doubt of the final success of intelligence, this obstinate question whether, after all, as we so glibly intimate, the old order changeth at all, whether, on the contrary, it has not become a Juggernautcar that crushes all originality and independence in action, — this breathes more and more plainly out of the progressing work of Ibsen. Hedda Gabler condemns the old order, in its dullness, its stifling mediocrity, but she is unable to adapt her energy to any wholesome system of new ideas, and she sinks into mere moral dissolution. She hates all that has been done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that hateful condition of spirit which cannot create, though it sees the need of creation, and can only show the horror which its sterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do to assert her energy is to burn the manuscript of Lövborg and to kill herself with General Gabler’s pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the Hedda Gablers who adorn its latest phase do best to die.

We have seen that Ibsen’s theory was that love of self is the fundamental principle of all activity. It is the instinct of self-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to every manifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Between the excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of Hedda Gabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, the master-builder, Solness. He, too, is led to condemn the old order, but in the act of improving it he is overwhelmed upon his pinnacle, and swoons to death, “dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.” Ibsen’s exact meaning in the detail of these symbolic plays will long be discussed, but they repay the closest and most reiterated study. Perhaps the most curious of all is The Lady from the Sea, which has been examined from the technically psychological view by a learned French philosopher, M. Jules de Gaultier. For M. de Gaultier the interest which attaches to Ibsen’s conception of human life, with its conflicting instincts and responsibilities, is more fully centred in The Lady from the Sea than in any other of his productions.

The theory of the French writer is that Ibsen’s constant aim is to reconcile and to conciliate the two biological hypotheses which have divided opinion in the nineteenth century, and which are known respectively by the names of Cuvier and Lamarck: namely, that of the invariability of species and that of the mutability of organic forms. In the reconciliation of these hypotheses Ibsen finds the only process which is truly encouraging to life. According to this theory, all the trouble, all the weariness, all the waste, of moral existences around us comes from the neglect of one or other of these principles, and true health, social or individual, is impossible without the harmonious application of them both. According to this view, the apotheosis of Ibsen’s genius, or at least the most successful elucidation of his scheme of ideological drama, is reached in the scene in The Lady from the Sea, where Wangel succeeds in winning the heart of Ellida back from the fascination of the Stranger. Certainly, in this mysterious and strangely attractive play Ibsen insists more than anywhere else on the necessity of taking physiology into consideration in every discussion of morals. He refers, like a zoölogist, to the laws which regulate the formation and the evolution of species, and the decision of Ellida, on which so much depends, is an amazing example of the limitation of the power of change produced by heredity. The extraordinary ingenuity of M. de Gaultier’s analysis of this play deserves recognition; whether it can quite be accepted as embraced by Ibsen’s intention may be doubtful. At the same time, let us recollect that, however subtle our refinements become, the instinct of Ibsen was probably subtler still.

In 1850, when Ibsen first crept forward with the glimmering taper of his Catilina, there was but one person in the world who fancied that the light might pass from lamp to lamp, and in half a century form an important part of the intellectual illumination of Europe. The one person who did suspect it was, of course, Ibsen himself. Against all probability and common sense, this apothecary’s assistant, this ill-educated youth, who had just been plucked in his preliminary examination, who positively was, and remained, unable to pass the first tests and become a student at the university, maintained in his inmost soul the belief that he was born to be “a knight of thought.” The impression is perhaps not uncommon among ill-educated lads; what makes this case unique, and defeats our educational formulas, is that it happened to be true. But the impact of Ibsen with the social order of his age was unlucky, we see, from the first; it was perhaps more unlucky than that of any other great man of the same class with whose biography we have been made acquainted. He was at daggers drawn with all that was successful and respectable and “nice” from the outset of his career until near the end of it.

Hence we need not be surprised if in the tone of his message to the world there is something acrimonious, something that tastes in the mouth like aloes. He prepared a dose for a sick world, and he made it as nauseous and astringent as he could, for he was not inclined to be one of those physicians who mix jam with their j ulep. There was no other writer of genius in the nineteenth century who was so bitter in dealing with human frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel clearness the satire of Carlyle is bluster, the diatribes of Leopardi shrill and thin. All other reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns; Ibsen is uniformly and impartially stern. That he probed deeper into the problems of life than any other modern dramatist is acknowledged, but i t was his surgical calmness which enabled him to do it. The problem-plays of Alexandre Dumas fils flutter with emotion, with prejudice and pardon. But Ibsen, without impatience, examines under his microscope all the protean forms of organic social life, and coldly draws up his diagnosis like a report. We have to think of him as thus ceaselessly occupied. Long before a sentence was written, he had invented and studied, in its remotest branches, the life-history of the characters who were to move in his play. Nothing was unknown to him of their experience, and for nearly two years, like a coral-insect, he was building up the scheme of them in silence. Odd little objects, fetishes which represented people to him, stood arranged on his writingtable, and were never to be touched. He gazed at them until, as if by some feat of black magic, he turned them into living persons, typical and yet individual. The actual writing down of the dialogue was swift and easy, when the period of incubation was complete. Each of his plays presupposed a long history behind it; each started, like an ancient Greek tragedy, in the full process of catastrophe. This method of composition was extraordinary, was perhaps unparalleled. It accounted in measure for the coherency, the inevitability, of all the detail, but it also accounted for some of the difficulties which meet us in the task of interpretation. Ibsen calls for an expositor, and will doubtless give occupation to an endless series of scholiasts. They will not easily exhaust their theme, and to the last something will escape, something will defy their most careful examination. It is not disrespectful to his memory to claim that Ibsen sometimes packed his stuff too closely. Criticism, when it marvels most at the wonder of his genius, is constrained to believe that he sometimes threw too much of his soul into his composition, that he did not stand far enough away from it always to command its general effect. The result, especially in the later symbolical plays, is too vibratory, and excites the spectator too much.

One very curious example of Ibsen’s minute care is found in the copiousness of his stage directions. He has been imitated in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty years ago it seemed extravagant and needless. As a fact, it was essential to the absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired to produce. The stage directions in his plays cannot be “skipped” by any reader who desires to follow the dramatist’s thought step by step, without losing the least link. These notes of his intention will be of ever-increasing value as the recollection of his personal wishes is lost. In 1899, Ibsen remarked to me that it was almost useless for actors nowadays to try to perform the comedies of Holberg, because there were no stage directions and the tradition was lost. Of his own work, fortunately, that can never be said. Dr. Verrall, in his brilliant and penetrating studies of the Greek tragedians, has pointed out more than once the “undesigned and unforeseen defect, with which, in studying ancient drama, we must perpetually reckon,” namely, the loss of the action and of the equivalent stage directions. It is easy to imagine “what problems Shakespeare would present if he were printed like the Poetae Scenici Graci,” and not more difficult to realize how many things there would be to puzzle us in Ghosts and The Wild Duck if we possessed nothing but the bare text.

V

The body of work so carefully conceived, so long maintained, so passionately executed, was far too disturbing in its character to be welcome at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen was loathed in Norway, and the attacks on him which filled the press were often of an extravagant character. At the present moment, any one conversant with Norwegian society, who will ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officer or a doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen’s influence, will be surprised at the unanimity of the reply. Opinions may differ as to the attractiveness of the poet’s art or of its skill, but there is an almost universal admission of its beneficial tendency. Scarcely will a voice be found to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light into the national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the national conscience, that even works like Ghosts, which shocked, and works like Rosmersholm, which insulted, the prejudices of his countrymen, were excellent in their result. The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, who reviled and attacked and abandoned his native land, who railed at every national habit, and showed a worm at the root of every national tradition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived long enough to be accompanied to his grave “to the noise of the mourning of a nation,” and he who had almost starved in exile to be conducted to the last resting-place by a parliament and a king.

It must always be borne in mind that, although Ibsen’s appeal is to the whole world, — his determination to use prose aiding him vastly in this dissemination, — yet it is to Norway that he belongs, and it is at home that he is best understood. No matter how acrid his tone, no matter how hard and savage the voice with which he prophesied, the accord between his country and himself was complete long before the prophet was silent. As he walked about, the strange, picturesque old man, in the streets of Christiania, his fellow citizens gazed at him with a little fear, but with some affection, and with unbounded reverence. They understood at last what the meaning of his message had been, and how closely it applied to themselves, and how much the richer and healthier for it their civic atmosphere had become. They would say, as the soul of Dante said in the Vita Nuova: —

No words, surely, could better express the intensity with which Ibsen had pressed his moral quality, his virtù, upon the Norwegian conscience, not halting in his pursuit till he had captured it, and had banished from it all other ideals of conduct. No one who knows will doubt that the recent events in which Norway has taken so chivalric, and at the same time so winning and gracious, an attitude in the eyes of the world owe not a little to their being the work of a generation nurtured in that new temper of mind, that spiritel nuovo d’ amore, which was inculcated by the whole work of Ibsen.

It is natural, of course, that other nations should be oblivious of, or indifferent to, this peculiar national quality. In Sweden, for example, although he was early read there, and although he made special studies of the Swedish forms of life, he was never greatly appreciated.

He remarked, in 1872, that it was difficult for Danes and Norwegians to put themselves in a line with Swedes, whose degree of social development was so much less mature than theirs. His only real friend in Sweden was the great poet, Carl Snoilsky, long an exile, like himself. Ibsen’s conquest of Danish culture was much more rapid; it was in Copenhagen, indeed, that he was earliest appreciated, and his name stood there for that of a great poet long before it was recognized in Christiania; from the publication of Brand onwards there was no longer any question about Ibsen’s eminence among thoughtful and cultivated Danes, led throughout by the intelligent criticism of Georg Brandes. Among the Continental peoples other than Scandinavian, it was Germany that fell the soonest under Ibsen’s spell. He had been accustomed to visit the north of that cou ntry from as early as 1852, and he had considerable familiarity with German customs. As a Scandinavian, the action of Prussia towards Denmark had, indeed, been odious to him, but he enjoyed German modes of life, and when the Franco-German war broke out, “I spent that great time in Dresden,” he said afterwards, “to the advantage, on many points, of my apprehension of world-history and human existence.” German criticism was not much occupied with him, until 1878, when The Pillars of Society was played in Berlin, and attracted the enthusiasm of the young. This enthusiasm, however, wavered before the storm of disfavor awakened by Ghosts, which managers tried for three years, without success, to present to an indignant public. The year 1887 is named as that in which German prejudice finally gave way to admiration, and Ibsen’s position was secure in Germany. The feeling for his works grew until it took ludicrous forms; there appeared shoals and flights of translations, each less graceful than the other, till at last (August 31,1892), we find Ibsen bemoaning loudly, “Alas! alas! I have far more German translators than I wish for.” In Germany, in Russia, in Holland, in Italy, Ibsen has for fifteen years past been recognized as one of the settled forces of literature. Even in France his genius is universally admitted. We must, of necessity, give a moment’s attention to the different fate which has attended him in the Anglo-Saxon world. Thirtyfive years have passed since Ibsen’s name was first mentioned in an English newspaper, and his reputation in England and America has undergone strange vicissitudes. His clearness of delineation, his extraordinary skill in the building up of a play and in the conduct of dialogue, his force and vitality, have, somewhat grudgingly and without genial sympathy, been accepted by Anglo-Saxon criticism as facts which cannot be gainsaid. But the British public has never loved him, and his plays are seldom acted in our theatres. In our attitude toward Ibsen, we are practically at issue with the rest of the cultivated world. We admit his existence, because we cannot help doing so, but we belittle it, and we resist it as much as we possibly can. There is no doubt that this is one of the many points in which the Anglo-Saxon world stands opposed to all the rest of Europe, and to fathom the causes of it, it would be necessary to go into international questions which are not fitted to the present discussion.

Two reasons, however, may be suggested for the curious grudge which English-speaking criticism, of the second order, continues to bear against Ibsen. One is that his moral anger, his violent appeal to the conscience, are with difficulty understood by those who have grown up in the atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon optimism. Americans and Englishmen are alike in this, that they admit with extreme difficulty the idea that their national characteristics are capable of improvement. That a poet should want to diagnose the diseases of “God’s own country,” when it is obvious that there can be no diseases there, seems so preposterous as to rob the satire of interest.

No one could successfully attack the conventions of either of the Anglo-Saxon nations except under the disguise of gross national flattery, such as Mr. Rudyard Kipling practices, because in no other way could he secure any attention. The Germanic and Scandinavian races are less confident of their virtues, and more amenable to reflection, and they will sit through a performance of such a drama as The Wild Duck, asking themselves how it affects their inner nature, and what message it has to their souls. The American or English audience merely says: “What funny people! Do you suppose they are intended to be funny ? ” The other possible reason is allied to the first. It is that by a long-confirmed habit, based upon our manners, the AngloSaxon world really tolerates the theatre only as a place of physical entertainment. This is the indignity which Puritanism has succeeded in fixing upon the stage.

The time is passed when fanaticism was able to close the playhouse altogether, or even to make it a sort of disgrace to be seen attending it. The most respectable people may now go to the play, but there lingers this result of Puritan prejudice, that nothing seen at the play can be, or ought to be, grave or intellectual. Accordingly, as none but dolls can be depended on to betray no mental or moral emotions, the Anglo-Saxon world has decided that its stage shall be inanimate; the figures which move on it shall always be puppets, — romantic, social, pantomimic, pathetic, what you will, but always puppets, — figures in whom is not the dangerous breath of life. Countries in which such a convention holds can never have a general apprehension of what the majestic, sinister, and powerfully vitalized dramatic art of Ibsen means to nations which have not enjoyed the advantages of Puritan paralysis.