Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (721 page)
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Authors: Henrik Ibsen
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Ibsen, in ‘A Doll’s House’ (1880) and ‘An Enemy of the People’ (1883), had preached the necessity of individualism, but, perceiving that he might be misunderstood as an upholder of self-interest in opposition to the welfare of others, he turned in ‘Rosmersholm’ (1887) and ‘Hedda Gabler’ (1891) to point the danger and futility of sheer self-assertion. Such a notion is implicit in both plays, although ‘Hedda Gabler’ seems chiefly a study of character and least of all a drama of ideas. Hedda is an unscrupulous individualist married to a dull pedant in whose rival for an academic position she finds an earlier lover. This rival is a creative scholar of infirm will who has been reformed by Hedda’s school friend, Mrs. Elvsted, and inspired to compose a great work. Hedda is jealous of Mrs. Elvsted, fearful lest Lövborg secure the position for which her husband is contending, and curious to discover how far she can determine the fate of another creature. Accordingly, she exerts her malign influence to spur Lövborg into dissipation, and, when he fancies himself forever disgraced by misconduct and the loss of his precious manuscript, she provides a pistol with which he may end his life. Lövborg dies, but Hedda, who had not foreseen that the pistol would be recognized as hers, is involved in the scandal. She can escape it only by according her favors to a libertine judge, aware of all the facts in the case, and prepared to profit by his knowledge. Although Hedda is without a moral qualm, she cannot endure public shame or submission to the will of another. She therefore shoots herself with the second pistol of the pair that she had inherited from her father.
Hedda is a female Mephistopheles, without passion, instinctively and deliberately evil, yet cowardly. As heartless as Becky Sharp, she is far more corrupt. She loathes her husband with his pedestrian mind and bourgeois interests; she loathes her condition as a wife and a mother soon-to-be; and she loathes Mrs. Elvsted as the good angel of Eilert Lövborg. Her prurient curiosity, her morbid dread of scandal, her malevolent delight in burning the manuscript of Lövborg and insidiously suggesting his suicide, are essential features in this portrait of one of the most disagreeable women of all literature. The play was published in
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The tendency toward symbolism, to be observed in the early romantic works of Ibsen, and occasionally in his dramas of social awakening, becomes dominant in ‘The Master Builder’ (‘Bygmester Solness’), published in 1892 and played the next season. Already in ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘The Lady from the Sea,’ Ibsen had mingled symbolism with naturalism; but only in ‘The Master Builder’ does the hidden allegory threaten to warp his surface story out of consistency. The piece, which begins with matter-of-fact scenes and situations from middle-class life, ere long develops into a tenuous fable that suggests much more than it presents.
As a drama of ideas ‘The Master Builder’ emphasizes two notions: the peril of selfish individualism, already shown in ‘Rosmersholm’ and ‘Hedda Gabler’; and the struggle of age against youth. Ibsen, conscious of his advancing years, felt the inevitable passing of power from the older to the younger generation. He felt, also, not only the fear of youth, but its fascination, especially in his innocent affair with Emilie Bardach, a girl of 18 whom he, at the age of 61, had met in the Tyrol during the summer of 1889, and with whom he later corresponded. He has universalized these merely personal sentiments, setting forth the problem of every man who lives long enough to regret what is gone and to strive desperately to hold what is slipping from him. This particular conflict Ibsen associates with the still larger conflict between individualism and altruism.
Solness, the master builder, has achieved success at the expense of his wife and his business associates. He has checked the rise of old Knut Brovik, and refused to young Ragnar Brovik permission to build independently. He has employed the latter’s sweetheart and captured her affections only as a ruse by which to retain Ragnar’s services. Obsessed, as he admits, with dread of the younger generation, yet thinking himself at last secure from it, he succumbs when the younger generation knocks at his door in the person of Hilda Wangel. Hilda, who had already appeared in a minor rôle in ‘The Lady from the Sea,’ is a strange and wilful maiden who induces Solness to relax his selfish schemes, and, at the same time, to attempt to mount, as he once was wont, to the top of a lofty tower. He can no longer safely climb to such heights, and yet, inspired by Hilda’s faith, he makes the attempt, only to fall. Though he forfeits life, Hilda professes satisfaction, inasmuch as, when he stood at the dizzy summit, she has heard ‘harps in the air.’ Hilda is the puzzle of the play, an influence for both good and evil, a symbol of youthful aspiration, or perhaps of youth as the enemy of age and of woman as the enemy of man. The charm of the drama lies in its tantalizing hints of concealed significances; its defect lies in its lack of proper correspondence between the human action and the allegory. Much in the later portions of the work is scarcely intelligible as a natural representation of life. ‘The Master Builder’ has been translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer (1893). It is discussed in the monographs on Ibsen by Otto Heller (1912), Jennette B. Lee (1907), M. J. Moses (1908), and Henry Rose (1908), and, by P. H. Grummann, in ‘Nebraska University Studies’ (1910).
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An Extract from ‘
ESSAYS IN LONDON AND ELSEWHERE
’
I. ON THE OCCASION OF “HEDDA GABLER”
WHETHER or no Henrik Ibsen be a master of his art, he has had a fortune that, in the English-speaking world, falls not always even to the masters — the fortune not only of finding himself the theme of many pens and tongues, but the rarer privilege and honour of acting as a sort of register of the critical atmosphere, a barometer of the intellectual weather. Interesting or not in himself (the word on this point varies from the fullest affirmation to the richest denial), he has sounded in our literary life a singularly interesting hour. At any rate he himself constitutes an episode, an event, if the sign of such action be to have left appearances other than you found them. He has cleared up the air we breathe and set a copy to our renouncement; has made many things wonderfully plain and quite mapped out the prospect. Whenever such service is rendered, the attentive spirit is the gainer; these are its moments of amplest exercise. Illusions are sweet to the dreamer, but not so to the observer, who has a horror of a fool’s paradise. Henrik Ibsen will have led him inexorably into the rougher road. Such recording and illuminating agents are precious; they tell us where we are in the thickening fog of life, and we feel for them much of the grateful respect excited in us at sea, in dim weather, by the exhibition of the mysterious instrument with which the captain takes an observation. We have held
Ghosts
, or
Rosmersholm
, or
Hedda Gabler
in our hand, and
they
have been our little instrument — they have enabled us to emulate the wary mariner; the consequence of which is that we know at least on what shores we may ground or in what ports we may anchor. The author of these strange works has in short performed a function which was doubtless no part of his purpose. This was to tell us about his own people; yet what has primarily happened is that he has brought about an exhibition of ours.
It is a truly remarkable show, for as to where
nous en sommes
, as the phrase goes, in the art of criticism and the movement of curiosity, as to our accumulations of experience and our pliancy of intelligence, our maturity of judgment and our distinction of tone, our quick perception of quality and (peculiar glory of our race) our fine feeling for shades, he has been the means of our acquiring the most copious information. Whether or no we may say that as a sequel to this we know Dr. Ibsen better, we may at least say that we know more about ourselves. We glow with the sense of how we may definitely look to each other to take things, and that is an immense boon, representing in advance a wonderful economy of time, a saving of useless effort and vain appeal. The great clarifying fact has been that, with
Hedda Gabler
and
Ghosts
and all the rest, we have stood in an exceptionally agitated way in the presence of the work of art, and have gained thereby a peculiarly acute consciousness of how we tend to consider it. It has been interesting to perceive that we consider the work of art with passion, with something approaching to fury. Under its influence we sweep the whole keyboard of emotion, from frantic enjoyment to ineffable disgust. Resentment and reprobation happen to have been indeed in the case before us the notes most frequently sounded; but this is obviously an accident, not impairing the value of the illustration, the essence of which is that our critical temper remains exactly the
naïf
critical temper, the temper of the spectators in the gallery of the theatre who howl at the villain of the play.
It has been the degree, in general, of the agitation that has been remarkable in the case before us, as may conveniently be gathered from a glance at the invaluable catalogue of denouncements drawn up by Mr. William Archer after perusal of the articles lately dedicated by the principal London journals to a couple of representations of Ibsen; that, if I mistake not, of
Ghosts
and that of
Rosmersholm
. This catalogue is a precious document, one of those things that the attentive spirit would not willingly let die. It is a thing, at any rate, to be kept long under one’s hand, as a mine of suggestion and reference; for it illuminates, in this matter of the study of Ibsen, the second characteristic of our emotion (the first as I have mentioned, being its peculiar intensity): the fact that that emotion is conspicuously and exclusively moral, one of those cries of outraged purity which have so often and so pathetically resounded through the Anglo-Saxon world.
We have studied our author, it must be admitted, under difficulties, for it is impossible to read him without perceiving that merely book in hand we but half know him — he addresses himself so substantially to representation. This quickens immensely our consideration for him, since in proportion as we become conscious that he has mastered an exceedingly difficult form are we naturally reluctant, in honour, to judge him unaccompanied by its advantages, by the benefit of his full intention. Considering how much Ibsen has been talked about in England and America, he has been lamentably little seen and heard. Until
Hedda Gabler
was produced in London six weeks ago, there had been but one attempt to represent its predecessors that had consisted of more than a single performance. This circumstance has given a real importance to the undertaking of the two courageous young actresses who have brought the most recent of the author’s productions to the light and who have promptly found themselves justified in their talent as well as in their energy. It was a proof of Ibsen’s force that he had made us chatter about him so profusely without the aid of the theatre; but it was even more a blessing to have the aid at last. The stage is to the prose drama (and Ibsen’s later manner is the very prose of prose) what the tune is to the song or the concrete case to the general law. It immediately becomes apparent that he needs the test to show his strength and the frame to show his picture. An extraordinary process of vivification takes place; the conditions seem essentially enlarged. Those of the stage in general strike us for the most part as small enough, so that the game played in them is often not more inspiring than a successful sack-race. But Ibsen reminds us that if they do not in themselves confer life they can at least receive it when the infusion is artfully attempted. Yet how much of it they were doomed to receive from
Hedda Gabler
was not to be divined till we had seen
Hedda Gabler
in the frame. The play, on perusal, left one comparatively muddled and mystified, fascinated, but — in one’s intellectual sympathy — snubbed. Acted, it leads that sympathy over the straightest of roads with all the exhilaration of a superior pace. Much more, I confess, one doesn’t get from it; but an hour of refreshing exercise is a reward in itself. The sense of being moved by a scientific hand as one sits in one’s stall has not been spoiled for us by satiety.
Hedda Gabler
then, in the frame, is exceedingly vivid and curious, and a part of its interest is in the way it lights up in general the talent of the author. It is doubtless not the most complete of Ibsen’s plays, for it owes less to its subject than to its form; but it makes good his title to the possession of a real method, and in thus putting him before us as a master it exhibits at the same time his irritating, his bewildering incongruities. He is nothing, as a literary personality, if not positive; yet there are moments when his great gift seems made up of negatives, or at any rate when the total seems a contradiction of each of the parts. I premise of course that we hear him through a medium not his own, and I remember that translation is a shameless falsification of colour. Translation, however, is probably not wholly responsible for three appearances inherent in all his prose work, as we possess it, though in slightly differing degrees, and yet quite unavailing to destroy in it the expression of life; I mean of course the absence of humour, the absence of free imagination, and the absence of style. The absence of style, both in the usual and in the larger sense of the word, is extraordinary, and all the more mystifying that its place is not usurped, as it frequently is in such cases, by vulgarity. Ibsen is massively common and “middle-class,” but neither his spirit nor his manner is small. He is never trivial and never cheap, but he is in nothing more curious than in owing to a single source such distinction as he retains. His people are of inexpressive race; they give us essentially the
bourgeois
impression; even when they are furiously nervous and, like Hedda, more than sufficiently fastidious, we recognise that they live, with their remarkable creator, in a world in which selection has no great range. This is perhaps one reason why they none of them, neither the creator nor the creatures, appear to feel much impulse to
play
with the things of life. This impulse, when it breaks out, is humour, and in the scenic genius it usually breaks out in one place or another. We get the feeling, in Ibsen’s plays, that such whims are too ultimate, too much a matter of luxury and leisure for the stage of feeling at which his characters have arrived. They are all too busy learning to live — humour will come in later, when they know how. A certain angular irony they frequently manifest, and some of his portraits are strongly satirical, like that, to give only two instances, of Tesman in
Hedda Gabler
(a play indeed suffused with irrepressible irony), or that of Hialmar Ekdal in
The Wild Duck
. But it is the ridicule without the smile, the dance without the music, a sort of sarcasm that is nearer to tears than to laughter. There is nothing very droll in the world, I think, to Dr. Ibsen; and nothing is more interesting than to see how he makes up his world without a joke. Innumerable are the victories of talent, and art is a legerdemain.
It is always difficult to give an example of an absent quality, and, if the romantic is even less present in Ibsen than the comic, this is best proved by the fact that everything seems to us inveterately observed. Nothing is more puzzling to the readers of his later work than the reminder that he is the great dramatic poet of his country, or that the author of
The Pillars of Society
is also the author of
Brand
and
Peer Gynt
, compositions which, we are assured, testify to an audacious imagination and abound in complicated fantasy. In his satiric studies of contemporary life, the impression that is strongest with us is that the picture is infinitely
noted
, that all the patience of the constructive pessimist is in his love of the detail of character and of conduct, in his way of accumulating the touches that illustrate them. His recurrent ugliness of surface, as it were, is a sort of proof of his fidelity to the real in a spare, strenuous, democratic community; just as the same peculiarity is one of the sources of his charmless fascination — a touching vision of strong forces struggling with a poverty, a bare provinciality, of life. I call the fascination of Ibsen charmless (for those who feel it at all), because he holds us without bribing us; he squeezes the attention till he almost hurts it, yet with never a conciliatory stroke. He has as little as possible to say to our taste; even his large, strong form takes no account of that, gratifying it without concessions. It is the oddity of the mixture that makes him so individual — his perfect practice of a difficult and delicate art, combined with such æsthetic density. Even in such a piece as
The Lady from the Sea
(much the weakest, to my sense, of the whole series), in which he comes nearer than in others — unless indeed it be in
Hedda Gabler
— to playing with an idea from the simple instinct of sport, nothing could be less picturesque than the general effect, with every inherent incentive to have made it picturesque. The idea might have sprung from the fancy of Hawthorne, but the atmosphere is the hard light of Ibsen. One feels that the subject should have been tinted and distanced; but in fact one has to make an atmosphere as one reads, and one winces considerably under “Doctor Wangel” and the pert daughters.
For readers without curiosity as to their author’s point of view (and it is doubtless not a crime not to have it, though I think it is a misfortune, an open window the less), there is too much of “Doctor Wangel” in Ibsen altogether — using the good gentleman’s name for what it generally represents or connotes. It represents the ugly interior on which his curtain inexorably rises and which, to be honest, I like for the queer associations it has taught us to respect; the hideous carpet and wall-paper and curtains (one may answer for them), the conspicuous stove, the lonely centre-table, the “lamps with green shades,” as in the sumptuous first act of
The Wild Duck
, the pervasive air of small interests and standards, the sign of limited local life. It represents the very clothes, the inferior fashions, of the figures that move before us, and the shape of their hats and the tone of their conversation and the nature of their diet. But the oddest thing happens in connection with this effect — the oddest extension of sympathy or relaxation of prejudice. What happens is that we feel that whereas, if Ibsen were weak or stupid or vulgar, this parochial or suburban stamp would only be a stick to beat him with, it acts, as the case stands, and in the light of his singular masculinity, as a sort of substitute — a little clumsy, if you like — for charm. In a word it becomes touching, so that practically the
blasé
critical mind enjoys it as a refinement. What occurs is very analogous to what occurs in our appreciation of the dramatist’s remarkable art, his admirable talent for producing an intensity of interest by means incorruptibly quiet, by that almost demure preservation of the appearance of the usual in which we see him juggle with difficulty and danger and which constitutes, as it were, his only coquetry. There are people who are indifferent to these mild prodigies; there are others for whom they will always remain the most charming privilege of art.