Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (743 page)

For the first twelve months Ibsen enjoyed the pleasures of the prodigal returned, and fed with gusto on the fatted calf. Then, when three years separated him from the illuminating soul-adventures of Gossensass, he began to turn them into a play. It proved to be
The Master-Builder
, and was published before the close of December, 1892, with the date 1893 on the title-page. This play was running for some time in Germany and England before it was played in Scandinavia. But on the evening of March 8, 1893, it was simultaneously given at the National Theatre in Christiania and at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. It was a work which greatly puzzled the critics, and its meaning was scarcely apparent until it had been seen on the stage, for which the oddity of its arrangements are singularly well adapted. It was, however, almost immediately noticed that it marked a new departure in Ibsen’s writings. Here was an end of the purely realistic and prosaic social dramas, which had reigned from
The League of Youth
to
Hedda Gabler
, and here was a return to the strange and haunting beauty of the old imaginative pieces. Mr. Archer was happily inspired when he spoke of “the pure melody” of the piece, and the best scenes of
The Master-Builder
were heroically and almost recklessly poetical.

This remarkable composition is full of what, for want of a better word, we must call “symbolism.” In the conversations between Solness and Hilda much is introduced which is really almost unintelligible unless we take it to be autobiographical. The Master-Builder is one who constructs, not houses, but poems and plays. It is the poet himself who gives expression, in the pathetic and erratic confessions of Solness, to his doubts, his craven timidities, his selfish secrets, and his terror at the uniformity of his “luck.” It is less easy to see exactly what Ibsen believed himself to be presenting to us in the enigmatical figure of Hilda, so attractive and genial, so exquisitely refreshing, and yet radically so cruel and superficial. She is perhaps conceived as a symbol of Youth, arriving too late within the circle which Age has trodden for its steps to walk in, and luring it too rashly, by the mirage of happiness, into paths no longer within its physical and moral capacity. “Hypnotism,” Mr. Archer tells us, “is the first and last word of the dramatic action”; perhaps thought-transference more exactly expresses the idea, but I should not have stated even this quite so strongly. The ground of the dramatic action seems to me to be the balance of Nemesis, the fatal necessity that those who enjoy exceptional advantages in life shall pay for them by not less exceptional, but perhaps less obvious, disadvantages. The motto of the piece — at least of the first two of its acts — might be the couplet of the French tragedian: —

C’est un ordre des dieux qui jamais ne se rompt De nous vendre bien cher les grands biens qu’ils nous font.

Beneath this, which we may call the transcendental aspect of the play, we find a solid and objective study of the self-made man, the headstrong amateur, who has never submitted to the wholesome discipline of professional training, but who has trusted to the help of those trolls or mascots, his native talent and his unfailing “luck.” Upon such a man descends Hilda, the disorganizer, who pierces the armor of his conceit by a direct appeal to his passions. Solness has been the irresistible sorcerer, through his good fortune, but he is not protected in his climacteric against this unexpected attack upon the senses. Samson philanders with Delila, and discovers that his strength is shorn from him. There is no doubt that Ibsen intended in
The Master-Builder
a searching examination of “luck” and the tyranny of it, the terrible effects of it on the Broviks and the Kajas whom nobody remembers, but whose bodies lie under the wheels of its car. The dramatic situation is here extremely interesting; it consists in the fact that Solness, who breaks every one else, is broken by Hilda. The inherent hardness of youth, which makes no allowances, which demands its kingdom here and now upon the table, was never more powerfully depicted. Solness is smashed by his impact with Hilda, as china is against a stone. In all this it would be a mistake to see anything directly autobiographical, although so much in the character and position of Solness may remind us, legitimately enough, of Ibsen himself, and his adventures.

The personal record of Ibsen in these years is almost silent. He was growing old and set in his habits. He was growing rich, too, and he surrounded himself with sedentary comforts. His wealth, it may here be said, was founded entirely upon the success of his works, but was fostered by his extreme adroitness as a man of business. Those who are so fond of saying that any man of genius might have excelled in some other capacity are fully justified if they like to imagine Ibsen as the model financier. He certainly possessed a remarkable aptitude for affairs, and we learn that his speculations were at once daring and crafty. People who are weary of commiserating the poverty of poets may be pleased to learn that when Ibsen died he was one of the wealthiest private citizens of Christiania, and this was wholly in consequence of the care he had taken in protecting his copyrights and administering his receipts. If the melancholy couplet is correct which tells us that

Aux petits des oiseaux Dieu donne la pature, Mais sa bonte s’arrkete a la litterature,

we must believe, with Ibsen’s enemies, that his fortunes were not under the divine protection.

The actual numbers of each of his works printed since he first published with Hegel in Copenhagen — a connection which he preserved without a breach until the end — have been stated since his death. They contain some points of interest. After 1876 Hegel ventured on large editions of each new play, but they went off at first slowly.
The Lady from the Sea
was the earliest to appear, at once, in an issue of 10,000 copies, which was soon exhausted. So great, however, had the public interest in Ibsen become in 1894 that the edition of 10,000 copies of
Little Eyolf
was found quite inadequate to meet the first order, and it was enlarged to 15,000, all of which were gone in a fortnight. This circulation in so small a reading public as that of Denmark and Norway was unprecedented, and it must be remembered that the simultaneous translations into most of the languages of Europe are not included.

Little Eyolf
, which was written in Christiania during the spring and summer of 1894, was issued, according to Ibsen’s cometary custom, as the second week of December rolled round. The reception of it was stormy, even in Scandinavia, and led to violent outbursts of controversy. No work from the master’s pen had roused more difference of opinion among the critics since the bluster over
Ghosts
fourteen years before. Those who prefer to absolute success in the creation of a work of art the personal flavor or perfume of the artist himself were predisposed to place
Little Eyolf
very high among his writings. Nowhere is he more independent of all other influences, nowhere more intensely, it may even be said more distressingly, himself. From many points of view this play may fairly be considered in the light of a
tour de force
. Ibsen — one would conjecture — is trying to see to what extremities of agile independence he can force his genius. The word “force” has escaped me; but it may be retained as reproducing that sense of a difficulty not quite easily or completely overcome which
Little Eyolf
produces. To mention but one technical matter; there are but four characters, properly speaking, in the play — since Eyolf himself and the Rat-Wife are but illustrations or symbolic properties — and of these four, one (Borgheim) is wholly subsidiary. Ibsen, then, may be said to have challenged imitation by composing a drama of passion with only three characters in it. By a process of elimination this has been  done by Aeschylus (in the
Agamemnon
), by Racine (in
Phe*dre
and
Andromaque
), and in our own day by Maeterlinck (in
Pelle*as et Me*lisande
). But Ibsen was accustomed to a wider field, and his experiment seems not wholly successful.
Little Eyolf
, at least, is, from all points of view, an exercise on the tight-rope. We may hazard the conjecture that no drama gave Ibsen more satisfaction to write, but for enjoyment the reader may prefer less prodigious agility on the trapeze.

If we turn from the technical virtuosity of
Little Eyolf
to its moral aspects, we find it a very dreadful play, set in darkness which nothing illuminates but the twinkling sweetness of Asta. The mysterious symbol of the Rat-Wife breaks in upon the pair whose love is turning to hate, the man waxing cold as the wife grows hot. The Angel of God, in the guise of an old beggar-woman, descends into their garden, and she drags away, by an invisible chain, “the little gnawing thing,” the pathetic lame child. The effect on the pair of Eyolf’s death by drowning is the subject of the subsequent acts. In Rita jealousy is incarnate, and she seems the most vigorous, and, it must be added, the most repulsive, of Ibsen’s feminine creations. The reckless violence of Rita’s energy, indeed, interpreted by a competent actress — played, for instance, as it was in London most admirably by Miss Achurch — is almost too painful for a public exhibition, and to the old criticism, “nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,” if a pedant chooses to press it, there teems no reply. The sex question, as treated in
Little Eyolf
, recalls
The Kreutzer Sonata
(1889) of Tolstoi. When, however, I ventured to ask Ibsen whether there was anything in this, he was displeased, and stoutly denied it. What, an author denies, however, is not always evidence.

Nothing further of general interest happened to Ibsen until 1896, when he sat down to compose another drama,
John Gabriel Borkman
. This was a study of the mental adventures of a man of high commercial imagination, who is artificially parted from all that contact with real affairs which keeps such energy on the track, and who goes mad with dreams of incalculable power, a study, in fact, of financial megalomania. It was said, at the time, that Ibsen was originally led to make this analysis of character from reading in the Christiania newspapers a report of the failure and trial of a notorious speculator convicted of fraud in 1895, and sentenced to a long period of penal servitude.

Whether this be so or not, we have in the person of John Gabriel Borkman a prominent example of the ninteenth century type of criminous speculator, in whom the vastness of view and the splendidly altruistic audacity present themselves as elements which render it exceedingly difficult to say how far the malefactor is morally responsible for his crime. He has imagined, and to a certain point has carried out, a monster metal “trust,” for the success of which he lacks neither courage nor knowledge nor practical administrative capacity, but only that trifling concomitant, sufficiency of capital. To keep the fires blazing until his vast model is molten into the mould, he helps himself to money here, there, and everywhere, scarcely giving a thought to his responsibilities, so certain is he of ultimate and beneficent triumph. He will make rich beyond the dreams of avarice all these his involuntary supporters. Unhappily, just before his scheme is ready and the metal runs, he is stopped by the stupidity of the law, and finds himself in prison.

Side by side with this study of commercial madness runs a thread of that new sense of the preciousness of vital joy which had occupied Ibsen so much ever since the last of the summers at Gossensass. The figure of Erhart Borkman is a very interesting one to the theatrical student. In the ruin of the family, all hopes concentre in him. Every one claims him, and in the bosoms of each of his shattered parents a secret hope is born, Mrs. Borkman believing that by a brilliant career of commercial rectitude her son will wipe out the memory of his father’s crime; Borkman, who has never given up the ambition of returning to business, reposing his own hopes on the co-operation of his son.

But Erhart Borkman disappoints them all. He will be himself, he will enjoy his life, he will throw off all the burdens both of responsibility and of restitution. He has no ambition and little natural feeling; he simply must be happy, and he suddenly elopes, leaving all their anticipations bankrupt, with a certain joyous Mrs. Wilton, who has nothing but her beauty to recommend her. Deserted thus by the
ignis fatuus
of youth, the collapse of the three old people is complete. Under the shock the brain of Borkman gives way, and he wanders out into the winter’s night, full of vague dreams of what he can still do in the world, if he can only break from his bondage and shatter his dream. He dies there in the snow, and the two old sisters, who have followed him in an anxiety which overcomes their mutual hatred, arrive in time to see him pass away. We leave them in the wood, “a dead man and two shadows” — so Ella Rentheim puts it—”for
that
is what the cold has made of us”; the central moral of the piece being that all the errors of humanity spring from cold-heartedness and neglect of the natural heat of love. That Borkman embezzled money, and reduced hundreds of innocent people to beggary, might be condoned; but there is no pardon for his cruel bargaining for wealth with the soul of Ella Rentheim, since that is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. There are points of obscurity, and one or two of positive and even regrettable whimsicality, about
John Gabriel Borkman
, but on the whole it is a work of lofty originality and of poignant human interest.

The veteran was now beginning to be conscious of the approaches of old age, but they were made agreeable to him by many tokens of national homage.