Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (45 page)

 

Love’s Comedy
shows the fine humor that is also in Ibsen, its lens always turned on the ills of society, and open to the holy human instinct of love.

With the hostility of the players under his direction and the clamor of hatred and outrage turned upon him by certain journalists, he had to have shoulders of iron, a hard head, firm fists. His land turned its back on him, disdained him, hated him, poured calumny upon him. So he shook the dust from his boots—he left, muttering verses against the herd of fools; he left, banished by the fossilized family of retardates and puritans. But deep in his heart still lay the sentiment of social redemption.

The revolutionary went off to see the golden sun of the Latin nations.

After this time of bathing in the sun, those works were born that raised him into the empyrean of modern dramatists, set him beside the great Wagner, upon the pinnacle of contemporary art and philosophy. . . . He gave life to those strange symbolic characters of his, from whose lips came denunciations of the deeply rooted evil of the new doctrine. The poor found in him a great defender; he was driven by the desire for social redemption. He was a giant architect who wished to raise his monumental edifice to save souls by prayer into the very sky, face to face with God.

The man of visions . . . found that there are finer mysteries in the common things of life than in the kingdom of fantasy; the greatest enigma lies in man himself. And his dream has been to see the coming of a better life, the rejuvenation of man, the destruction of the social machinery of our age. The Socialist was born in him; he became, if you wish, a second redeemer.

And so arose
The Wild Duck, Nora, The Enemy of the
People, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler.
He wrote for the masses, for the salvation of the masses. Machinery has been dealt rude blows by the enormous hammer of the Scandinavian god. The hammering has been heard around the planet. The intellectual aristocracy has been with him. He has been greeted as one of the world’s great heroes. But his work has not produced the effect he desired. And his efforts have been veiled by a shadow of pessimism.

And in the Latin nations he found struggles and horrors, disasters and sadness; his soul has suffered for the bitterness of France. There came a moment when he believed the soul of the race was dead. And yet hope did not entirely abandon his heart. He believed in the future resurrection: “Who knows when the dove will bring the olive branch of promise in its beak? We will see it. So far as I am concerned, until that day I shall remain in my little padded room in Sweden, jealous of my solitude, arranging distinguished rhymes. The wandering crowd will undoubtedly be angry, and treat me as a renegade, but that crowd terrifies me. I don’t want to be splashed with mud; I want to await the dawn that is sure to come, wearing my spotless clean wedding-suit.”

Ah, poor lost humanity! That strange redeemer wants to save it, find a remedy for evil and a path that leads to true good. But every minute that passes deals a death blow to a dream. Men are marked by an original taint. Their very organism is infected, and infectious; their soul is subject to sin and error. Their road leads them through mudholes, or bramble-patches. Life is a field of lies and pain. Evil are those who come to know the face of happiness while the immense mass of wretches writhe under the leaden weight of fatal misery. And the redeemer suffers the pain and grief of the multitude. His cry is not heard; his tower does not wear the crown it merits. And so his agitated heart is in mourning; and so from the lips of his new characters pour forth terrible words, raging condemnations, harsh and flagellating truths. He comes to his pessimism “by the back door.” He has glimpsed the Ideal, like a mirage. He has followed it; his feet have been bloodied and tattered on the rocks of the road, and he has reaped harvests of naught but disillusionment. His fata morgana has vanished.

Yet his symbolic progeny are animated by a wondrous and eloquent life-force. His characters are beings who live and move and act on this earth, in the midst of today’s society. They have the reality of our own existence. They are our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. Sometimes we are surprised to hear our own innermost thoughts issue from their lips. For Ibsen is brother to Shakespeare. . . .

The
types
are observed, taken from life. Even national peculiarities, the setting of Norway, allows the playwright to accentuate the universal traits of man. He, the creator, has squeezed out his heart, has plumbed the depths of his mental ocean, has entered his dark inner jungle—he is the deep-diver of the common mind, into the depths of his own. And there must have been a day on which even in his mother’s womb his soul was filled with the virtue of art. His suffering must be the sublime suffering of genius—of a peregrine genius, in which are joined all the occult psychic energies of all those distant lands in which he has believed there may be found, in certain manifestations, the reality of the Dream. And that “unapproachable,” “stand-offish” man, that excellent man, that hero, that almost-superman, lived through a holocaust, was the apostle and martyr to the incontestable truth, was an immense thunderclap in the desert, an ominous flash of lightning in a world of blind men. And he sought examples of evil because evil saturates the world. From Job to our own days, the verbal flesh of dialogue has never given such jolting and such shock to the spirit as in the works of Ibsen. Everything speaks—bodies and souls. Sickness, dream, madness, death all speak; their speeches are impregnated with the Beyond. They are “Ibsenian” beings through which the essence of the centuries flows. We are transported thousands of leagues away from Literature, that high and pleasant branch of the Fine Arts, to a different, mysterious world, in which the thinker has the stature of an archangel. We feel, in the surrounding darkness, a breeze that blows from the Infinite, that realm whose muffled waves, beating against the seashore, we hear from time to time.

His language is constructed of logic, yet it is animated by mystery. Ibsen is one of those who has most deeply peered into the enigma of the human psyche. He rises to God. The river of his thought flows down from the mountain of primordial ideas. He is the moral hero. Solitary and powerful man! he comes down from his tower of ice to exercise his trade—tamer of the races, regenerator of nations, savior of humankind—a grand trade, ay!, for he does not believe he will live to see the longed-for day of transfiguration.

We must not be surprised if mysterious fogs hang over his titanic
oeuvre.
As in all sovereign spirits, as in all the hierarchs of thought, his Word is veiled in mists, like the fissures and vents of hot springs, or the craters of volcanoes.

As consecrated to his work as a priest, he is the most admirable example of the unity of action and thought that may be found in all the history of human ideas.

He is the formidable mystery of an ideal religion which with unparalleled courage preaches the truths of its evangel even to the civilized arrows of the white barbarians.

If Ibsen were not a rebelling Titan, he would be a saint, for sainthood is genius in character, moral genius. And he has felt on his face the breath of the unknown, the arcane, and in his explorations of the shadows of his own abyss he has obeyed that breath. And in the midst of the pains of mankind he wanders through the world, and he is the echo of all the groans and sighs. Here are his lines to the swan:

“Innocent swan, forever mute, forever calm! Neither pain nor happiness disturbs the serenity of your indifference. Majestic protector of the Elf that dozes, you have glided across the waters without a murmur, without a song.

“All that we gather upon our paths, vows of love, anguished glances, hypocrisies, lies—what do they matter to you! What do they matter to you?

“And yet on the morning of your death you sighed out your agony, you whispered your pain. . . .

“And you were a swan!”

The snow-white Olympian bird sung in such a melancholy way by the Arctic poet . . . is, for him, the nuncio of the otherworldly Enigma.

That is why the inviolate Unknown will always appear—strong, silent—wrapped in an impenetrable cloud; its strength, the end of all strengths; its silence, all harmonies alloyed together. . . . Authority, the constitution of society, the conventions of deceived or perverse men, religions turned to tainted uses, the injustices of the law and the laws of injustice, the entire old system of the civil organism, the entire apparatus of modern society’s culture and progress—all of great and monstrous Jericho hears the luminous enemy’s trumpets. But its walls do not fall, its factories remain standing. Through windows and battlements, the enemy sees the pink faces of the women who live in the city smile, and the men shrug their shoulders. And the enemy trumpet sounds against the deceptions of society; against the opponents of the ideal; against the Pharisees of the public good; against the bourgeoisie, whose chief representative will always be Pilate; against the judges who mete out false justice, the priests who preach false doctrines; against Capital, whose coin, if it were broken, like the host in the story, would drip human blood; against the exploitation of poverty and misery; against the errors of the State; against the leagues, rooted in centuries of ignominy, that conspire against man and even against nature; against the idiotic rabble that stones prophets and worships the golden calf; against all that has deformed and reduced the brain of womankind and made her, through immemorial centuries of opprobrium, a passive and inferior being; against the gags and chains of the sexes; against vile trade, mud-bespattered politics, and prostituted thought. The trumpet sounds in
Hedda Gabler,
in
An Enemy of the People,
in
The Master Builder,
in
The Pillars of Society,
in
The Pretenders,
in
The League of Youth,
in
Little Eyolf.

Sincerity is the guardian archangel of huge Ibsen. Other angels escort him—Truth, Nobility, Goodness, Virtue. He is also generally accompanied by the cherub Eironia. . . .

Laurent Tailhade, praising the excellencies of
An Enemy of the People,
said, “If there is anything that can ever mitigate the damnation earned by the [Parisian] public for those first performances—men and women of the world, stockbrokers, pillars of men’s clubs and scribblers for newspapers, idiots and snobs of every stripe, the astonishing incompetence that distinguishes them, the monstrous appetite they generally show for every sort of rubbish—it is the reception given, for these last three years, to two geniuses whose bitterness has nothing to do with what is so justly called ‘the French taste.’ I am referring to Richard Wagner and Henrik Ibsen.” If this is said of Paris, then pay heed, you centers of thought in other nations! May the excellencies of national taste pour forth and ascend to the high pinnacles of Idea and Art; may the doctrine of the chosen guides be heard; may the “demon of stupidity” be exorcised with the holy water of the ideal.

Ibsen does not believe in the triumph of his cause. That is why irony has drawn sardonic lines upon his face. But is there anyone who dares affirm that the white, untamable hair of that proud, catastrophe-prophesying Precursor of the Future shall not finally be gilded by the sun of the long-awaited dawn?

The cortège for the funeral of Wagner would require the solemn thunder of
Tannhäuser
; to accompany the casket of a sweet bucolic poet there should be, as in antique bas-reliefs, flute players making their melodious double flutes lament; for the ceremony at which the body of Melesigenes
⁵⁰
was burned, vibrant choruses of lyres; to accompany—oh! allow me to speak his name before the great epic Shade; at any rate, you evil smiles that might appear, he is now dead!—to accompany, I say, the funeral of José Martí, his own language would be needed, his formidable organ with all its many registers, its powerful verbal choirs, its golden trumpets, its wailing strings, its sobbing oboes, its flutes, its drums, its lyres, its zithers. Yes, ye Americans of the Spanish tongue, we must tell the world who this great man was, this man who now has fallen.

He who writes these lines, which rush out from heart and mind, is not one of those who believe in the riches of the Americas. . . . We are very poor. . . . So poor that our spirits, if not for foreign nourishment, would starve. And so we should weep many tears for this man who has fallen! The man who died there in Cuba was one of the best of the little we poor people have; he was a generous millionaire; he constantly emptied out his pockets, yet as though by magic he was always rich. Among the enormous volumes of the collection of
La Nación
there is so much of his fine metal and precious gems that the finest statue could be made of it. . . . Never did our tongue find better inks, ideas, splendors. . . . And what agile grace, and what natural strength so long-sustained, so magnificent!

Another truth: . . . What we call genius, that fruit that is borne only upon hundred-year-old trees, that majestic phenomenon of the intellect elevated to its highest power, that high creative marvel—Genius, that is, which has never yet been born in our Republics—has tried to appear twice among us: once, in an illustrious man of this land, Argentina, and again in José Martí. And Martí was not, as might perhaps be thought, one of those demi-geniuses that Mendès talks about, unable to communicate with men because his wings raise him over their heads, unable to rise to the sphere of the gods because his wings’ strength is not sufficient and the earth will always pull him downward. No, this Cuban was
un hombre
—he was a man. More than that, he was what the true superman should be: grand and virile, possessed of the secret of his excellence, in communion with God and with Nature.

In communion with God lived this man of soft yet immense heart, this man who abhorred pain and evil, this amiable lion with the breast of a dove who, though able to cut, smash, wound, bite, rip, was always kind and gentle, even with his enemies. And in communion with God he was, having ascended to God by the firmest and surest stairway—the stairway of Pain. Mercy found in this creature its temple: through it, one might say that his soul followed the four rivers mentioned by Ruysbroeck the Admirable: the river that ascends, and leads to the divine heights; the river that leads to compassion for captive souls; the other two rivers that enfold all the miseries and sorrows of the lost and wounded human flock. He rose to God by the path of compassion and by the path of pain. Martí suffered much!—from the consuming robes of temperament and illness to the immense sadness of the chosen one who feels himself unknown among the general stolidity that surrounds him; and, lastly, brimming over with love and patriotic madness, he consecrated himself to following a sad star, the solitary star of his Island, the deceiving star that led this ill-fortuned wise and wizardly king to fall suddenly in the blackest death. . . .