CHAPTER IV.

IBSENISM.

IN the course of the last two centuries the whole civilized world has, with greater or less unanimity, repeatedly recognised a sort of intellectual royalty in some contemporary, to whom it has rendered homage as the first and greatest among living authors. For a great part of the eighteenth century Voltaire, le roi Voltaire,' was the poet laureate' of all civilized nations. During the first third of the present century this position was held by Goethe. After his death the throne remained vacant for a score of years, when Victor Hugo ascended it amidst the enthusiastic acclamations of the Latin and Slavonic races, and with a feeble opposition from those of Teutonic origin, to hold it until the end of his life.

At the present time voices have for some years been heard in all countries claiming for Henrik Ibsen the highest intellectual honours at the disposal of mankind. It is wished that the Norwegian dramatist should, in his old age, be recognised as the world-poet of the closing century. It is true that only a part of the multitude and of the critical representatives of its taste acclaims him; but the fact that it has entered anyone's mind at all to see in him a claimant for the throne of poetry makes a minute examination of his titles to the position

necessary.

That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power is not for a moment to be denied. He is extraordinarily emotive, and has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and impressive manner that which has excited his feelings. (We shall see that these are almost always feelings of hatred and rage, i.e., of displeasure.) A natural capacity drew him towards the stage-a capacity for imagining situations in which the characters are forced to turn inside out their inmost nature; in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds, and modes of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible to the senses, but potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature and in words. Like Richard Wagner, he knows how to group events into living frescoes possessing the charm of significant pictures; with this difference, however, that Ibsen works, not like Wagner, with strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating vision into the backgrounds of souls and the conditions of

humanity. Fairy-lore is not lacking in Ibsen either, but he does not allow the imagination of the spectators to run riot in mere spectacles; he forces them into moods, and binds them by his spell in circles of ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.

His strong desire to embody the thought occupying his mind in a single picture, which can be surveyed at one view, also dictated to him the set form of his drama—a form not invented,. but largely perfected, by him. His pieces are, as it were, final words terminating long anterior developments. They are the sudden breaking into flame of combustible materials accumulating during years, it may be during whole human lives, or even generations, and of which the sudden flare brilliantly illumines a wide extent of time and space. The incidents of the Ibsen drama more frequently take place in a day, or at most in twice twentyfour hours, and in this short space of time there are concentred all the effects of the course of the world and of social institutions on certain characters, in such a conspectus that the destinies of the dramatis personæ become clear to us from the moment of their first appearance. The Doll's House, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, The Pillars of Society, and Hedda Gabler comprise about twenty-four hours; An Enemy of Society, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea, about thirty-six hours. It is the return to the Aristotelian doctrine of the unities of time and space with an orthodoxy compared with which the French classicists of the age of Louis XIV. are heretics. I might well term the Ibsenite technique a technique of fireworks, for it consists in preparing long in advance a staging on which the suns, Roman candles, squibs, fireballs and concluding fire-sheaves are carefully placed in proper position. When all is ready the curtain rises, and the artistically-constructed work begins to crackle, explosion following explosion uninterruptedly with thunder and lightning. This technique is certainly very effective, but hardly true. In reality events rarely lead up to a catastrophe so brilliant and succinct. In Nature all is slowly prepared, and unrolls itself gradually, and the results of human deeds covering years of time do not compress themselves into a few hours. Nature does not work epigrammatically. She cannot trouble herself about Aristotelian unities, for she has always an infinity of affairs of her own in progress at one and the same time. As a matter of handicraft, one is certainly often forced to admire the cleverness with which Ibsen guides and knots the threads of his plot. Sometimes the labour is more successful than at other times, but it always implies a great expenditure of textile skill. Whoever sets most store on truth in a poem-that is, on the natural action of the laws of life-will often enough bring away from Ibsen's dramas

an impression of improbability, and of toilsome and subtle lucubrations.

The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time, which may be said to be the poetic counterpart of the painter's artifice (difficult, but for the most part barren) of foreshortening .in space. Each of the terse words which suffice him has something of the nature of a peephole, through which limitless vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples and all ages have few situations at once so perfectly simple and so irresistibly affecting as the scenes to cite only a few-where Nora is playing with her children,* where Dr. Rank relates that he is doomed to imminent death by his inexorable disease,† where

* NORA (the children talk all at once to her during the following). And so you have been having great fun? That is splendid. Oh, reaily! you have been giving Emmy and Bob a slide, both at once! Dear me! you are quite a man, Ivar. Oh, give her to me a little, Mary Ann. My sweetheart ! (Takes the smallest from the nurse, and dances it up and down.) Yes, yes; mother will dance with Bob, too. What! did you have a game of snowballs as well? Oh, I ought to have been there. No, leave them, Mary Ann; I will take their things off. No, no, let me do it; it is so amusing. Go to the nursery for awhile, you look so frozen. You'll find some hot coffee on the stove. (The nurse goes to the room on the left. NORA takes off the children's things and throws them down anywhere, while she lets the children talk to each other and to her.) Really! Then there was a big dog there who ran after you all the way home? But I'm sure he didn't bite you. No; dogs don't bite dear dolly little children. Don't peep into those parcels, Ivar. You want to know what there is? Yes, you are the only people who shall know. Oh, no, no, that is not pretty. What! must we have a game? What shall it be, then? Hide and seek? Yes, let us play hide and seek. Bob shall hide first. Am I to? Very well, I will hide first.—A Doll's House, Griffith and Farran, p. 30.

† RANK (in NORA'S and HELMER'S room). [He has that day discovered a symptom in himself which he knows is an infallible sign of approaching death.] Yes, here is the dear place I know so well. It is so quiet and comfortable here with you two.

HELMER. You seemed to enjoy yourself exceedingly upstairs, too.

RANK. Exceedingly. Why should I not? Why shouldn't one get enjoy. ment out of everything in this world? At any rate, as much and as long as one can. The wine was splendid.

HELMER. Especially the champagne.

RANK. Did you notice it, too? It was perfectly incredible the quantity I contrived to drink. . . . Well, why should one not have a merry evening after a well-spent day?

HELMER. Well spent? As to that, I have not much to boast of.
RANK (tapping him on the shoulder). But I have, don't you see.

NORA. Then, you have certainly been engaged in some scientific investiga. tion, Dr. Rank.

RANK. Quite right. . . .

NORA. And am I to congratulate you on the result?

RANK. By all means you must.

NORA. Then the result was a good one?

Frau Alving with horror discerns his dissolute father* in her only son, where the housekeeper, Frau Helseth, sees Rosmer and Rebecca die in each other's arms,† etc.

Similarly, it must be acknowledged that Ibsen has created some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare. Gina (in The Wild Duck) is one of the most profound creations of world-literature-almost as great as Sancho Panza, who inspired.

RANK. The best possible, alike for the physician and patient—namely, certainty.

NORA (quickly and searchingly). Certainty?

RANK. Complete certainty. Ought not I, upon the strength of it, to be very merry this evening?

NORA. Yes, you were quite right to be, Dr. Rank. are very fond of masquerade balls.

I am sure you

RANK. When there are plenty of interesting masks present, I certainly

am....

HELMER.... But what character will you take [at our next masquerade]? RANK. I am perfectly clear as to that, my dear friend.

HELMER. Well?

RANK. At the next masquerade I shall appear invisible.
HELMER. What a comical idea!

RANK. Don't you know there is a big black hat-haven't you heard stories of the hat that made people invisible? You pull it all over you, and then nobody sees you. . . . But I am quite forgetting why I came in here. Helmer, just give me a cigar-one of the dark Havanas. . . . Thanks. (He lights his cigar.) And now good-bye And now good-bye . . . and thank you for the light. [He nods to them both and goes.-A Doll's House, pp. 96-100. Frau Alving is speaking with Pastor Manders, and is just relating that she was one day witness to a scene in the adjoining room which proved to her that her departed husband was carrying on an intrigue with her maidservant. In the next room are Oswald, her son, and Regina, the offspring of the intercourse of her husband with the maid-servant.

[From within the dining room comes the noise of a chair overturned, and at the same moment is heard:

REGINA (sharply, but whispering). Oswald, take care! Are you mad? Let me go!

MRS. ALVING (starts in terror). Ah! (She stares wildly towards the half-opened door; OSWALD is heard coughing and humming inside. A bottle is uncorked.)

MANDERS (excited). What in the world is the matter? What is it, Mrs Alving?

MRS. ALVING (hoarsely). Ghosts! The couple from the conservatory have risen again!-Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen, Camelot Series, p. 150.

Frau Helseth has in vain sought for Rosmer and Rebecca in the house. MADAME HELSETH (goes to the window and looks out). Oh, good God! that white thing there!-My soul! They're both of them out on the bridge! God forgive the sinful creatures-if they're not in each other's arms! (Shrieks aloud.) Oh-down-both of them! Out into the mill-race! Help! help! (Her knees tremble, she holds on to the chair back, shaking all over; she can scarcely get the words out.) No. No help here. The dead wife has taken them. - Rosmerholm. London, Walter Scott, p. 144. The last sentence is not a happy one. It is commonplace, upsetting the mood of the hearer or reader.

it. Ibsen has had the daring to create a female Sancho, and in his temerity has come very near to Cervantes, whom no one has equalled. If Gina is not quite so overpowering as Sancho, it is because there is wanting in her his contrast to Don Quixote. Her Don Quixote, Hjalmar, is no genuine, convinced idealist, but merely a miserable self-deluding burlesquer of the ideal. None the less, no poet since the illustrious Spanish master has succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain, jolly, healthy common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety as to things eternal, and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, obvious duties, without a suspicion of higher moral obligations, as this Gina, e.g., in the scene where Hjalmar returns home after having spent the night out.* Hjalmar also is a perfect creation, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the cogent temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entrancingly that 'self-restraint' in every word which, as Goethe said, ' reveals the master.' Little Hedwig (again in The Wild Duck), the aunt Juliane Tesman (in Hedda Gabler), perhaps also the childishly egoistical consumptive Lyngstrand (in The Lady from the Sea), are not inferior to these characters. It should, however, be noticed that, with the exception of Gina, Hjalmar and Hedwig, the lifelike and artistically delightful persons in Ibsen's dramas never play the chief parts, but move in subordinate tasks around the central figures. The latter are not human beings of flesh and blood, but abstractions such as are evoked by a morbidly excited brain. They are attempts at the embodiment of Ibsenite doctrines, homunculi, originating not from natural procreation, but through the black art of the poet.

Hjalmar has passed the night away from home, having learned that his wife before her marriage with him had had a liaison with another. He returns in the morning, crapulous and hipped. He is bombastic and melodramatic, while his wife is calm and practical :

GINA (standing with the brush in her hand, and looking at him). Oh, there now, Ekdal; so you've come after all?

HJALMAR (comes in and answers in a toneless voice). I come-only to depart again immediately.

GINA. Yes, yes; I suppose so. But, Lord help us, what a sight you are! HJALMAR. A sight?

GINA. And your nice winter coat, too! Well, that's done for. ... Then, you are still bent on leaving us, Ekdal?

HJALMAR. Yes; that's a matter of course, I should think.

GINA. Well, well. (Sets a tray with coffee, etc., on the table.) Here's a drop of something warm, if you'd like it. "And there's some bread and butter and a snack of salt meat.

HJALMAR (glancing at the tray). Salt meat! Never under this roof! It's true I haven't had a mouthful of solid food for nearly twenty-four hours, but no matter. . . . Oh no, I must go out into the storm and the snow. blast-go from house to house and seek shelter for my father and myself. GINA. But you've got no hat, Ekdal. You've lost your hat, you know, etc. -The Wild Duck, Act V.