_ I
One indisputable service has Ibsen rendered to the drama: he has revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the final decades of the nineteenth century,--when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction like Edmond de Goncourt did not hesitate to declare that the drama was outworn at last, that it was unfitted to convey the ideas interesting to the modern world, and that it had fallen to be no more than a toy to amuse the idle after dinner,--Ibsen brought forth a succession of social dramas as tho to prove that the playhouse of our own time could supply a platform whereon a man might free his soul and boldly deliver his message, if only he had first mastered the special conditions of the playwright's art. Of course, Ibsen has solved none of the problems he has propounded; nor was it his business as a dramatist to provide solutions of the strange enigmas of life, but rather to force us to exert ourselves to find each of us the best answer we could.
No one who has followed the history of the theater for the past quarter of a century can fail to acknowledge that these social plays of Ibsen have exerted a direct, an immediate and a powerful influence on the development of the contemporary drama. It is easy to dislike them; indeed, it is not hard even to detest them; but it is impossible to deny that they have been a stimulus to the dramatists of every modern language--and not least to playwrights of various nationalities wholly out of sympathy with Ibsen's own philosophy. The fascination of these social dramas may be charmless, as Mr. Henry James once asserted; but there is no gainsaying the fascination itself. As M. Maeterlinck has declared, Ibsen is "perhaps the only writer for the stage who has caught sight of and set in motion, a new, tho still disagreeable, poetry, which he has succeeded in investing with a kind of savage, gloomy beauty"; and M. Maeterlinck then questions whether this beauty is not too savage and too gloomy to become general or definitive. But, none the less, it is at least beauty, a quality long banished from the stage, when Ibsen showed how it might be made to bloom there again.
Nor is there any dispute as to the variety and the veracity of the characters that people these studies from life. Indeed, as Mr. Archer once pointed out, "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakspere) of discussing certain of his female characters as tho they were real women, living lives apart from the poet's creative intelligence." And in yet another way is Ibsen treated like Shakspere, in that there is superabundant discussion not only of his characters, male and female, but also of his moral aim, of his sociological intention, of his philosophy of life, while very little attention is paid to his dramaturgic craftsmanship, to his command of structural beauty, to his surpassing skill in the difficult art of the play-maker. Yet Shakspere and Ibsen are professional playwrights, both of them, each making plays adjusted exactly to the conditions of the theater of his own time; and if the author of 'Othello' can prove himself (when the spirit moves him) to be a master-technician, so also can the author of 'Ghosts.'
There is ample recognition of Ibsen as the ardent reformer seeking to blow away the mists of sentimentality, and of Ibsen, the symbolist, suggesting dimly a host of things unseen and strangely beautiful; but there is little consideration of Ibsen's solid workmanship, of his sure knowledge of all the secrets of the stage, of his marvelous dexterity of exposition, construction and climax. No doubt, it is as a poet, in the largest meaning of the word, that Ibsen is most interesting; but he is a playwright also,--indeed, he is a playwright, first and foremost; and in that aspect also he is unfailingly interesting. For those who insist that a poet must be a philosopher, Ibsen is to be ranked with Browning as affording endless themes for debate; but for those who demand that a dramatic poet shall be a playwright, Ibsen is a rival of Scribe and of the younger Dumas and of all the school of accomplished craftsmen in France who have made Paris the capital of the dramatic art. Ibsen's skill as a playwright is so consummate that his art is never obtruded. In fact, it was so adroitly hidden that when he first loomed on the horizon, careless theatrical critics were tempted rather to deny its existence. He is such a master of all the tricks of the trade that he can improve upon them or do without them, as occasion serves; and perhaps it is only those thoroly familiar with the practises of the accomplished French playwrights of the nineteenth century who perceive clearly the superiority of Ibsen in the mere mechanism of the dramaturgical art.
II
Altho it is possible to consider his stage-technic apart from his teaching, it needs to be noted at the outset that Ibsen the playwright owes a large portion of his power and effectiveness to Ibsen the poet-philosopher. As it happens, the doctrine of individual responsibility, which is the core of Ibsen's code, is a doctrine most helpful to the dramatist. The drama, indeed, differentiates itself from all other literary forms in that it must deal with a struggle, with a clash of contending desires, with the naked assertion of the human will. This is the mainspring of that action without which a drama is a thing of naught; and perhaps the most obvious backbone for a play is the tense contest of two human beings, each knowing clearly what he wants and each straining to attain it, at whatever cost to his adversary, to all others, and even to himself. Rivals fighting to the death, a hero at war with the world, a single soul striving to wrench itself free from the fell clutch of fate,--such is the stuff out of which the serious drama must be compounded.
Now, as it happens, no philosopher has ever reiterated more often than Ibsen his abhorrence of smug and complacent compromise, his belief in the unimpeded independence of the individual, his conviction that every creature here below owes it as a duty to himself to live his own life in his own way. Just as _Brand_ stiffens himself once more and makes the implacable declaration:
Beggar or rich,--with all my soul
I _will_; and that one thing's the whole!
So _Dr. Stockman_ announces his discovery that "the strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone"; and in every play we find characters animated by this unhesitating determination and this unfaltering energy. Even Ibsen's women, so subtly feminine in so many ways, are forever revealing themselves virile in their self-assertion, in their claim to self-ownership. His plays move us strangely in the performance, they grip at the outset and firmly hold us to the relentless end, because his dramaturgic skill is exerted upon themes essentially dramatic in that they deal with this stark exhibition of the human will and with the bitter struggle that must ensue when the human will is in revolt against the course of nature or against the social bond.
When the poet-philosopher has suggested to the playwright one of these essentially dramatic themes, Ibsen handles it with a directness which intensifies its force and which is in itself evidence of his poetic power. As Professor Butcher has pointed out, "we are perhaps inclined to rate too low the genius which is displayed in the general structure of an artistic work; we set it down merely as the hard-won result of labor, and we find inspiration only in isolated splendors, in the lightning-flash of passion, in the revealing power of poetic imagery." In these last gifts Ibsen may seem to many, if not deficient, at least, less abundant than some other dramatic poets; but he can attain "the supreme result which Greek thought and imagination achieve by their harmonious cooeperation"; he can present "the organic union of parts." He has the sense of form which we feel to be the final guerdon of Greek endeavor.
A play of Ibsen's is always compact and symmetrical. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it never straggles, but ever moves straightforward to its conclusion. It has unity; and often it conforms even to the pseudo-unities proclaimed by the superingenious critics of the Italian renascence. Sometimes a play of Ibsen's has another likeness to a tragedy of the Greeks, in that it presents in action before the assembled spectators only the culminating scenes of the story. 'Ghosts' recalls 'OEdipus the King,' not only in the horror at the heart of it and the poignancy of the emotion it evokes, but also in its being a fifth act only, the culmination of a long and complex concatenation of events, which took place before the point at which Sophocles and Ibsen saw fit to begin their plays. In the Greek tragedy, as in the Scandinavian social drama, the poet has chosen to deal with the result of the action, rather than with the visible struggle itself; it is not the present doings of the characters, but their past deeds, which determine their fate.
Altho no other play of Ibsen's attains the extraordinary compactness and swiftness of 'Ghosts,' several of them approach closely to this standard, the 'Master-Builder,' for example, 'Little Eyolf' and more especially 'Rosmersholm,'--in which the author did not display on the stage itself more than a half of the strong series of situations he had devised to sustain the interest of the spectator and to elucidate his underlying thesis. But Ibsen does not hold himself restricted to any one formula; and sometimes he prefers, as in the 'Enemy of the People,' to let the whole story unroll itself before the audience. Only slowly did Ibsen come to a mastery of his own methods; and he had begun, in the 'League of Youth' and in the 'Pillars of Society' by doing what every great dramatist had done before him,--by accepting the form worked out by his immediate predecessors and adjusted to the actual theater of his own time. Just as Shakspere followed the patterns set by Kyd and Marlowe, by Lyly and Greene, just as Moliere copied the model ready to his hand in the Italian comedy-of-masks, so Ibsen began by assimilating the formulas which had approved themselves in France, the land where the drama was flourishing most luxuriantly in the middle of the nineteenth century, formulas devised by Scribe and only a little modified by Augier and the younger Dumas.
III
For threescore years, at least, Scribe was the salient figure in the French theater; and his influence endured more than twoscore years after his death. He can be considered from discordant standpoints; to the men of letters Scribe seems wholly unimportant, since his merits were in great measure outside of literature; to the men of the theater Scribe is a personality of abiding interest, since he put his mark on the drama of his own day in almost every one of its departments. In the course of his active career as a playwright he made over farce, first of all, then the comedy-of-intrigue, and finally the comedy-of-manners; he tried his hand at the historical play; and he was the chief librettist of the leading French composers of opera, both grand and comic. He might lack style; he might be barren of poetry; he might be void of philosophy; his psychology might be pitifully inadequate; his outlook on life might be petty;--but he was pastmaster of the theater, and from him were hidden none of the secrets of that special art.
It was in Scribe's hands that there was worked out the formula of the "well-made play,--" _la piece bien faite_,--in which the exposition was leisurely and careful, in which the interest of expectancy was aroused early and sustained to the end, in which the vital scenes of the essential struggle,--the _scenes a faire_,--were shown on the stage at the very moment of the story when they would be most effective, and in which a logical conclusion dimly foreseen, but ardently desired, was happily brought about by devices of unexpected ingenuity. In perfecting the formula of the "well-made play" Scribe may have taken hints from Beaumarchais, especially from the final act of the 'Marriage of Figaro'; and he had found his profit also in a study of the methods of the melodrama, which had been elaborated in the theaters of the Parisian boulevards at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which had been imitated already by Hugo and the elder Dumas. At its best, the "well-made play" was an amusing piece of mechanism, a clockwork toy which had a mere semblance of life, but which did precisely what its maker had constructed it to do.
The piece put together according to this formula was sufficient to itself, with its wheels within wheels; and its maker had no need of style or of poetry, of psychology or of philosophy. So long as the playwright was content to be a playwright only and did not aspire to be a dramatist with his own views of life, the formula was satisfactory enough; but when the younger Dumas and Augier came on the stage they wanted to put a broader humanity into their plays, and they could make room for this only by simplifying the machinery. Yet, while they were delivering each his own message, they accepted the model of the "well-made play"; and it is to this that we may ascribe the artificiality we begin to discern even in such masterpieces of dramaturgic craftsmanship as the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' and the 'Demi-monde.'
Upon Ibsen also the influence of Scribe is as obvious as it is upon Augier and Dumas _fils_. The earliest of his social dramas, the 'League of Youth' and the 'Pillars of Society' are composed according to the formula of the "well-made play," with its leisurely exposition, its intricate complications of recoiling intrigue, its ingeniously contrived conclusion. If we compare the 'League of Youth' with Scribe's 'Bertrand et Raton,' or with Sardou's 'Rabagas'; if we compare the 'Pillars of Society' with Dumas's 'Etrangere,' or Augier's 'Effrontes' we cannot fail to find a striking similarity of structure. Set even 'A Doll's House' by the side of any one of a dozen contemporary French comedies, and it is easy to understand why Sarcey declared that play to be Parisian in its construction,--up to the moment of _Nora's_ revolt and self-assertion, so contrary to the social instinct of the French. And this explains also why it was that Ibsen, as Herr Lindau has told us, made little or no impression on the German dramatists until after the appearance of 'Ghosts,' altho the preceding plays had been acted frequently in the German theaters. The scenes of these early plays are laid in Norway, it is true, and the characters are all Norwegian, and altho it is easy enough for us, to-day, with our knowledge of what Ibsen has become, to find in them the personal equation of the author, still he was then frankly continuing the French tradition of stage-craft, with a willing acceptance of the formula of the "well-made play" and with no effort after novelty in his dramaturgic method. Not until he brought forth the 'Ghosts' is there any overt assertion of his stalwart and aggressive personality.
In the beginning Ibsen was no innovator. So far at least as its external form is concerned, the kind of play he proffered at first was very much what actors and audiences alike had been accustomed to,--a kind of play perfectly adjusted to the existing customs of the stage. What he did was to take over the theater as a going concern, holding himself free to modify the accepted formula only after he had mastered it satisfactorily. Considering Ibsen's inexperience as a writer of prose-plays dealing with contemporary life, the 'League of Youth' is really very remarkable as a first attempt. Indeed, its defects are those of its models; and it errs chiefly in its excess of ingenuity and in the manufactured symmetry of the contrivance whereby the tables are turned on _Stensgard_, and whereby he loses all three of the women he has approached.
As Lowell has said: "It is of less consequence where a man buys his tools than what use he makes of them"; but it so happened that Ibsen acquired his stage-craft in the place where it is most easily attained, in the place where Shakspere and Moliere had acquired it,--in the theater itself. In 1851, when he was only twenty-three, he had been appointed "theater-poet" to the newly opened playhouse in Bergen; and after five years there he had gone to Christiania to be director of a new theater, where he was to remain yet another five years. In this decade of his impressionable and plastic youth Ibsen had taken part in the production of several score plays, some of them his own, others also original in his native tongue by Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger, and many more translated from Scribe, from Scribe's collaborators and from Scribe's contemporaries. In his vacation travels, to Copenhagen and to Dresden, he had opportunity to observe a wider variety of plays; but even in these larger cities the influence of Scribe was dominant, as it was all over the civilized world in the mid-years of the century.
As Fenimore Cooper, when he determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is obvious significance in the fact that of all Ibsen's dramas, those which have won widest popularity in the theater itself are those which most frankly accept the Gallic framework,--the 'Pillars of Society,' the 'Doll's House,' and 'Hedda Gabler.' Yet it is significant, also, that even in the least individual of Ibsen's earlier pieces, the action is expressive of character; and we cannot fail to see that Ibsen's personages control the plot; whereas, in the dramas of Scribe, the situations may be said almost to create the characters, which, indeed, exist only for the purposes of that particular story.
IV
In spite of Ibsen's ten years of apprenticeship in two theaters, in daily contact with the practical business of the stage, it was not with prose-dramas of contemporary life that he first came forward as a dramatist. In fact, his juvenile 'Katilina' (1850) was written when he was but just of age, before he was attached to the theater professionally, before he had read any dramatists except Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger, and before he had had the chance to see much real acting on the stage itself. It was while he was engaged in producing the plays of others that he brought out also his own 'Mistress Inger at Ostraat' (1855), and the 'Vikings at Helgeland' (1858), both of them actable and often acted. They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and now Hugo.
'Mistress Inger' is a historical melodrama, with a gloomy castle, spectral pictures and secret passages, with shifting conspiracies, constant mystery-mongering and contorted characters. The inexpert playwright uses soliloquy not merely to unveil the soul of the speaker (its eternally legitimate use), but also to convey information to the audience as to the facts of the intrigue (an outworn expedient Ibsen never condescended to use in the later social dramas). The plot of 'Mistress Inger' is not veracious or convincing or even plausible; and the play lacks the broad simplicity of story to be found in the later 'Vikings,' a saga-like drama, a tale of blood and fate, which recalls Wagnerian opera in its primitive massiveness, in the vigor of its legend, in its tragic pathos, and in its full-blooded characters larger than life and yet pitifully human. Power again there is in a third drama dealing with the historic past of Norway, the 'Pretenders' (1864), which has a savage nobility of spirit. It is true that the masterful figure of _Bishop Nicholas_ is enigmatic enough to have stalked out of one of Hugo's lyrical melodramas, but to counterbalance this there is a pithy wisdom in the talk of the _Skald_ which one would seek in vain in the French romanticist drama.
Nowadays many of us are inclined to regard the historical drama as a bastard form and to agree with Maeterlinck in dismissing even the most meritorious attempts as "artificial poems that arise from the impossible marriage of past and present." Already between the 'Vikings' and the 'Pretenders' had Ibsen undertaken a play dealing with contemporary social usages. 'Love's Comedy' (1862) made its way on the stage; and it has found an English translator. But in this rendering it reveals itself as an attempt to commingle romance and satire; it appears to us as hopelessly unfunny; and there is an artistic inconsistency between a stern realism seeking to handle actual life with rigorous tensity and a soaring idealism which keeps obtruding itself.
'Love's Comedy' is in verse, irregular and rimed, well-nigh impossible to render satisfactorily into another tongue. Ibsen never again undertook to use rime or even meter in handling the manners of his own time. "I cannot believe that meter will be employed to any considerable extent in the drama of the near future, for the poetic intentions of the future cannot be reconciled with it," so Ibsen declared in 1883, thus passing judgment on 'Love's Comedy.' And he added that he had written scarcely any verse for years but "had exclusively cultivated the incomparably more difficult art of writing in the even, beautiful idiom of real life."
It was in 1857 that Bjoernson had put forth 'Synnoeve Solbakken,' a mere novelet, it is true, but still the firstling of a native Norwegian literature, reproducing the very accent of the soil; and here we have once more an example of the way in which the novel is now continually affecting the development of the drama, as the play has in the past influenced the evolution of prose-fiction. For more than ten years Ibsen failed to see how much it would profit him to follow Bjoernson's lead. Between 'Love's Comedy' and the 'League of Youth' he put forth his two great dramatic poems, 'Brand' (1866) and 'Peer Gynt' (1867); and even after the 'League of Youth' (1869) had opened the series of modern social dramas, he published 'Emperor and Galilean' (1873) before resuming his incisive study of the life that lay around him.
The career of Julian the Apostate is sketched in what must be termed a chronicle-play, in two parts and in ten acts, a broadly brushed panorama of antique life, displaying Ibsen's abundant invention, his ability to handle boldly a large theme, his gift of putting characters erect on their feet with a few swift strokes. Altho 'Emperor and Galilean,' like 'Brand' and like 'Peer Gynt' was intended for the closet only, and not for the stage itself, it proves its author to be a true dramatist, centering the interest of his story on an essential struggle and keeping in view always the pictorial aspects of his action.
In this chronicle-play, as in his two greater dramatic poems, Ibsen reveals his perfect understanding of the practical necessities of the playhouse, even tho he did not choose always to conform to them. Then he turned his back on antiquity and faced the present in the series of prose-plays by which he is most widely known to actual playgoers. He found his characters and his themes in modern life and in his native land; and the social dramas followed one another in steady succession,--'Pillars of Society' (1877), 'A Doll's House' (1879), 'Ghosts' (1881), 'An Enemy of the People' (1882), the 'Wild Duck' (1884), 'Rosmersholm' (1886), the 'Lady from the Sea' (1888), 'Hedda Gabler' (1890), the 'Master-Builder' (1892), 'Little Eyolf' (1894), 'John Gabriel Borkman' (1896) and 'When We Dead Awaken' (1899).
As we look down this list, we see that it is perhaps unfair to class all the later plays as social dramas. Some of them, more especially the latest of them all, 'When We Dead Awaken,' seem to be symbolical rather than social, allegorical in intent even if they remain realistic in treatment. Brandes long ago declared that Ibsen had had a Pegasus killed under him; but when we consider the 'Lady from the Sea' and 'When We Dead Awaken' and perhaps one or two other of their later companions, we may well believe that the winged steed was not actually slain. Wounded it may have been, only to recover its strength again and to proffer its back once more for the poet to bestride.
V
These more poetic of Ibsen's plays in prose seem at times almost surcharged with a meaning which is nevertheless often so mockingly intangible and evasive, that we dare to wonder at last whether the secret they persist in hiding in this tantalizing fashion would really reward our efforts to grasp it; and we find comfort in Lowell's apt saying that "to be misty is not to be mystic." Ibsen is mystic, no doubt, but on occasion he can be misty also. And not only the plays that are merely misty but even those that are truly mystic, are less likely than the plainer-spoken social dramas to hold our attention in the theater itself, where the appeal is to the assembled multitude, and where all things need to be clearly defined so that the spectators can follow understandingly every phase of the changing action.
In the most of his social dramas Ibsen makes his meaning transparently clear; and there is never any undue strain on the attention of the average playgoer. Especially is he a master of the difficult art of exposition. It is the plain duty of the playwright to acquaint the audience with the antecedent circumstances upon which the plot is based,--to inform the spectators fully as to that part of the story which has gone before and which is not to be displayed in action on the stage,--to explain the relation of the several characters to each other,--and to arouse interest in what is about to happen. Scribe, than whom no one ever had a wider knowledge of the necessities of the theater, held the exposition to be so important that he often sacrificed to it the whole of his first act, introducing his characters one by one, setting forth clearly what had happened before the play, and sometimes postponing the actual beginning of the action to the end of the first act, if not to the earlier scenes of the second. Scribe seems to have believed that it did not matter much how dull the first act might be, since the spectators had paid their money and would not abandon hope until they had seen at least the second act, in which he sought always to grip their interest.
In the 'League of Youth,' the earliest of his social dramas, Ibsen follows in Scribe's footsteps; and the first act is little more than a preparatory prolog. In this play the whole story is set forth in action in the play itself; but in the following dramas, 'Pillars of Society' and 'A Doll's House' Ibsen reveals his tendency to deal with the results of deeds which took place before he begins the play itself. In other words, he suppresses his prolog, preferring to plunge at once into his action; and this forces him to modify Scribe's leisurely method. He does not mass his explanations all in the earlier scenes; he scatters them thruout the first act, and sometimes he even postpones them to the later acts. But he is careful to supply information before it is needed, adroitly letting out in the first scene what is required for the understanding of the second scene, and artfully revealing in the second scene what must be known before the third scene can be appreciated.
This method is less simple than Scribe's; it is not only more difficult, it may be dangerous; but when it is managed successfully it lends to the drama a swift directness delightful to all who relish a mastery of form. In 'Ghosts,' for example, the play which is acted before us is little more than a long fifth act, in three tense scenes; and the knowledge of what had happened in the past is ingeniously communicated to the audience at the very moment when the information is felt to be most significant. But in 'Rosmersholm,' strong as the drama is and fine as its technic is, Ibsen's method seems to be at fault in that we learn too late what it would have interested us greatly to know earlier. It is only at the end almost that we are allowed to perceive what were _Rebecca West's_ real intentions in coming to Rosmersholm and how the influence of the house itself has transformed her. When the curtain rises she is presented to us already a changed woman; and we are at a loss to understand her motives for the evil deeds she has wrought, until we are told at last that she once was far different from what she now is. Here Ibsen loses more than he gains by abandoning the simpler method of massing his exposition in the earlier scenes of the play. Anything which confuses the spectator, which leaves him in doubt, which keeps him guessing, is contrary to Spencer's principle of "economy of attention," as important in the other arts as it is in rhetoric.
Altho he is ever seeking to awaken curiosity, to arouse the interest of expectancy, and to excite in the spectators a desire to see the thing through, Ibsen refrains from any mere mystery-mongering for its own sake. He wishes his audience to give attention not so much to the bare happenings of his story, however startling they may be in themselves, as to the effect which these happenings are certain to have on the characters. He is abundant in inventive ingenuity and in devising effective situations; and the complications of the plot of the 'Pillars of Society' would probably have hugely pleased Scribe. But he has also the larger imagination which can people situation with character and which can make situation significant as an opportunity for character to express itself. Ingenious as he is in plot-building, with him character always dominates situation. To Ibsen character is destiny, and the persons of his plays seem to have created, by their own natural proceeding, the predicaments in which they are immeshed.
Ibsen is particularly happy in the subordinate devices by which he reveals character,--for example, _Maia's_ taking off the green shade when the _Master-Builder_ enters the room. And another device, that of the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early 'League of Youth,' is so delicately utilized in certain of the later plays--witness, the "vine-leaves in his hair" of 'Hedda Gabler' and the "white horses" in 'Rosmersholm'--that these recurrent phrases are transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner's leading-motives. So, too, Ibsen does without the _raisonneur_ of Dumas and Augier, that condensation of the Greek chorus into a single person, who is only the mouthpiece of the author himself and who exists chiefly to point the moral, even tho he may sometimes also adorn the tale. Ibsen so handles his story that it points its own moral; his theme is so powerfully presented in action that it speaks for itself.
It must also be noted that Ibsen, like all born playwrights, like Scribe and Dumas and Augier, like Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere, is well aware of the double aspect of the theater, in that the stage can rise to the loftiest heights of philosophic poetry and that it can fall also to the lowest depths of the show-business. An audience has ears, but the spectators who compose it have eyes also; and the born playwright never fails to provide the picturesqueness and the visible movement which satisfy the senses, whatever may be the more serious appeal to the mind. In the modern theater the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame; and it is the duty of the dramatist to satisfy our demand for a stage-setting pictorially adequate. The sets of Ibsen's plays have evidently been sharply visualized by him; they are elaborately described; and they lend themselves effectively to the art of the scene-painter. Sometimes they are beautiful in themselves, novel and suggestive; always are they characteristic of the persons and of the underlying idea of the play.
VI
When we examine carefully the earlier of his social dramas we discover Ibsen to be a playwright of surpassing technical dexterity, whose work is sustained and stiffened and made more valuable and more vital by the cooeperation of the philosopher that Ibsen also is, a philosopher who is a poet as well and who helps the playwright to find the stuff he handles, the raw material of his art, in the naked human soul, in its doubts and its perplexities, in its blind gropings and in its ineffectual strivings. But in considering the later plays we are forced to wonder whether the philosopher has not gained the upper hand and reduced the playwright to slavery.
It was of Ibsen, no doubt, that M. Maeterlinck was thinking when he asserted that "the first thing which strikes us in the drama of the day is the decay, one might almost say, the creeping paralysis, of external action. Next, we note a very pronounced desire to penetrate deeper into human consciousness, and to place moral problems on a high pedestal." And there is no denying that Ibsen's interest in moral problems has grown steadily in intensity, and that he has sought to penetrate deeper and deeper into human consciousness. His latest play, 'When We Dead Awaken,' altho adjusted to the conditions of the modern theater and altho perfectly actable, seems to be intended rather more for the reader than for the spectator. Essentially dramatic as it is, its theatric realization is less satisfactory--as tho Ibsen was chafing against the restraints of the actual theater, restraints which are an integral element of its power as a form of expression.
In the same suggestive essay, M. Maeterlinck remarked on the steady decline of the taste for bald theatrical anecdotes,--the taste which Scribe and Sardou were content to gratify; and he declared that "mere adventures fail to interest us because they no longer correspond to a living and actual reality." And yet no one has more sharply proclaimed the sovran law of the stage than the Belgian critic-poet; no one has more sympathetically asserted that "its essential demand will always be _action_. With the rise of the curtain, the high intellectual desire within us undergoes transformation; and in place of the thinker, psychologist, mystic, or moralist, there stands the mere instinctive spectator, the man electrified negatively by the crowd, the man whose one desire is to see something happen." In his later and more poetic plays Ibsen seems to be appealing more especially to the mystic and the moralist; whereas in the earlier social dramas he was able to grip the attention of the mere instinctive spectator, while also satisfying the unexprest desires of the thinker.
The sheer symbolism of the poet-philosopher is powerfully suggestive, and these later plays have an interest of their own, no doubt; but it is in the earlier social dramas that Ibsen most clearly reveals his dramaturgic genius,--in the 'Pillars of Society,' and the 'Doll's House,' in 'Ghosts' and in 'Hedda Gabler.' Dennery might envy the ingenuity with which _Consul Bernick_ is tempted to insist on the fatal order that seems for a season to be the death-sentence of his own son; and Sardou would appreciate the irony of _Nora's_ frantic dance at the very moment when she was tortured by deadly fear. But these theatric devices, in Dennery's hands or in Sardou's, would have existed for their own sake solely; but in Ibsen's, effective as they are, they have a deeper significance. He is able to avail himself of the complicated machinery of the "well-made play," to flash a piercing light into the darker recesses of human nature. However clever he may be in his handling of these scenes, his cleverness is a means only; it is not an end in itself. He never gives over "his habit of dealing essentially with the individual caught in the fact,"--to borrow an apt phrase from Mr. Henry James. The mechanism may be almost as elaborate as it is in a play of Scribe's, wherein there is ultimately nothing but ingenuity of invention and adroitness of construction; but it is never allowed to crush or to keep out human nature.
_Consul Bernick_ is one of Ibsen's most veracious characters, with his cloaking morality, his unconscious egotism, and his unfaltering selfishness, disclosed so naively and so naturally. Less boldly drawn but not the less truthful is _Helmer_, that inexpugnable prig, with his shallow selfishness, his complacent conceit, and his morality for external use only. Ibsen is never happier, and never is his scalpel more skilful, than when he is laying bare the hollowness of shams like these. Never is his touch more delicate or more caressing than when he is delineating a character like _Bernick's_ sister _Martha_, with her tender devotion and her self-effacing simplicity. Not even _Helmer's_ wife, _Nora_, is more truthfully conceived. _Nora_ is veraciously feminine in never fathoming _Dr. Rank's_ love for her, or at least in her refusal to formulate it, content to take his friendship and ask herself no questions. Truly womanly again is her attitude when he speaks out at last and thrusts upon her the knowledge of his passion,--her shrinking withdrawal, her instant ordering in of the lights, and her firm refusal then, in her hour of need, to profit by the affection he has just declared.
It must be regretted that Ibsen does not dismiss either _Nora_ or _Bernick_ with the final fidelity that might have been expected. _Bernick's_ unexpected proclamation of his change of heart, so contrary to his habits, is a little too like one of those fantastic wrenchings of veracity of which Dickens was so often guilty in the finishing chapters of his stories. Character is never made over in the twinkling of an eye; and this is why the end of the 'Doll's House' seems unconvincing. _Nora_, the morally irresponsible, is suddenly endowed with clearness of vision and directness of speech. The squirrel who munches macaroons, the song-bird who is happy in her cage, all at once becomes a raging lioness. And this is not so much an awakening or a revelation, as it is a transformation; and the _Nora_ of the final scenes of the final act is not the _Nora_ of the beginning of the play. The swift unexpectedness of this substitution is theatrically effective, no doubt; but we may doubt if it is dramatically sound. Ibsen has rooted _Nora's_ fascination, felt by every spectator, in her essential femininity, only at the end to send her forth from her home, because she seemed to be deficient in the most permanent and most overpowering of woman's characteristics--the maternal instinct. It may be that she did right in leaving her children; it may even be that she would have left them; but up to the moment when she declared her intention to go, nothing in the play has prepared the spectator for this strange move. Ibsen has failed to make us feel when the unexpected happened that this, however unforeseen, was exactly what we ought to have expected.
No fault of this kind can be found with 'Ghosts,' that drastic tragedy of a house built on the quicksands of falsehood, that appalling modern play with the overwhelming austerity of an ancient tragic drama, that extraordinarily compact and moving piece, in which the Norwegian playwright accomplished his avowed purpose of evoking "the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual life." A few years only before Ibsen brought forth his 'Ghosts,' Lowell had asserted that "That Fate which the Greeks made to operate from without, we recognize at work within, in some vice of character or hereditary disposition"; and Greek this play of Ibsen's is in its massive simplicity, in the economy of its bare structure with five characters only, with no change of scene, with no lapse of time, and with an action that rolls forward irresistibly with inevitable inexorability. As there was something AEschylean in 'Brand' so there is something Sophoclean in 'Ghosts'; altho Ibsen lacks the serenity of the great Greek and Sophocles had a loftier aim than that of evoking "the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual life." There is no echo in 'OEdipus' of the cry of revolt which rings thru 'Ghosts,' and yet there was a strange similarity in the impression made on at least one spectator of the actual performances of these tragedies, the ancient and the modern, the one after the other, at a few days' interval here in New York,--an impression of deepening horror that graspt the throat and gript the heart with fingers of ice.
The most obvious resemblance between the Greek tragedy and the Scandinavian social drama is in their technic, in that the two austere playwrights have set before us the consequences of an action, rather than the action itself. Here Ibsen has thrown aside the formula of the "well-made play," using the skill acquired by the study of Scribe in achieving a finer form than the French playwright was capable of, a form seemingly simple but very solidly put together. The structure of 'Ghosts' recalls Voltaire's criticism of one of Moliere's plays that it seemed to be in action, altho it was almost altogether in narrative. Ibsen has here shown a skill like Moliere's in making narrative vitally dramatic. Ibsen has none of Moliere's breadth of humor, none of his large laughter, none of his robust fun; indeed, Ibsen's humor is rarely genial; grim and almost grotesque, it is scarcely ever playful; and there is sadly little laughter released by his satiric portrayals of character. But the Scandinavian playwright has not a little of the great Frenchman's feeling for reality, and even more of his detestation of affectation and his hatred of sham. The creator of _Tartuffe_ would have appreciated _Pastor Manders_, an incomparable prig, with self-esteem seven times heated, engrossed with appearances only and ingrained with parochial hypocrisy.
But we may be assured that Moliere, governed by the social instinct as he was, would never have shared Ibsen's sympathy for the combatant hero of his next play, that 'Enemy of the People,' with the chief figure of which the dramatist has seemed willing for once to be identified. We may even incline to the belief that Moliere would have dismist _Dr. Stockman_ as lacking in common-sense, and in the sense of humor, and also as a creature both conceited and self-righteous, pitiably impractical and painfully intolerant. And we are quite at a loss even to guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the unforgetable figure of _Celimene_ would have thought of _Hedda Gabler_, that strangest creation of the end of the century, anatomically virtuous, but empty of heart and avid of sensation.
In 'Hedda Gabler' as in the 'Enemy of the People' Ibsen gives up the Sophoclean form which was exactly appropriate for the theme of 'Ghosts.' With admirable artistic instinct the playwright returns to the framework of the "well-made play" or at least to that modification of the Scribe formula which Augier and Dumas _fils_ had devised for their own use. The action has not happened before the curtain rises on the first act; it takes place in the play itself, in front of the spectators, just as it does in the 'Demi-monde.' The exposition is contained in the first act, clearly and completely; the characters are all set in motion before us, _Hedda_ and her husband, _Mrs. Elvsted_ and _Eilert_, and the sinister figure of _Inspector Brack_ in the background. This first act, even to its note of interrogation hung in the air at the end, might have been constructed by Augier,--just as the scene in the second act between _Hedda_ and _Brack_ recalls the manner of the younger Dumas, even in its lightness and its wit. Yet we may doubt whether any of the modern French playwrights could have lent the same curt significance to this commonplace interview between a married _demi-vierge_ and an _homme-a-femmes_;--of their own accord these French terms come to the end of the pen to describe these French types.
Interesting as 'Hedda Gabler' is on the stage and in the study, suggestive as it is, it cannot be called one of Ibsen's best-built plays. Technically considered it falls below his higher level; it does not sustain itself even at the elevation of the 'Demi-monde' or of the 'Effrontes.' It does not compel us to accept its characters and its situations without question. It leaves us inquiring, and, if not actually protesting, at least unconvinced. We might accept the heroine herself as an incarnate spirit of cruel curiosity, inflicting purposeless pain, and to be explained, even if not to be justified, only by her impending maternity,--which she recoils from and is unworthy of. But I, for one, cannot help finding _Hedda_ inconsistent artistically, as tho she was a composite photograph of irreconcilable figures. For example, she shrinks from scandal, yet she burns _Eilert's_ manuscript, she gives him one of her pistols, and finally she commits suicide herself, than which nothing could more certainly provoke talk. The pistols themselves seem lugged in solely because the playwright needed to have them handy for two suicides,--just as _Brack_ walks into _Hedda's_ house in the early morning, not of his own volition, but because the playwright insisted on it. So at the end _Mrs. Elvsted_ could not have had with her all the notes of _Eilert's_ bulky book, tho she might have had a rough draft; and she would never have sat down calmly to look over these notes instead of rushing madly to the hospital to _Eilert's_ bedside. Again, _Inspector Brack_, when he hears of _Eilert's_ death, has really little or no warrant in jumping to the conclusion that _Hedda_ is an accessory before the fact; and even if she was, this would not give him the hold on her which she admits too easily. More than once, we find a summary swiftness in the motives alleged, for things done before the spectators have time to grasp the reasons for these deeds, which therefore appear to be arbitrary. There is a hectic flush of romanticism in this play, not discernible in any other of Ibsen's social dramas, a perfervidness, an artificiality, which may not interfere with the interest of the story but which must detract from its plausibility at least and from its ultimate value.
VII
Whatever inconsistencies may be detected now and again by a minute analysis of motive,--and after all these inconsistencies are slight and infrequent,--the characters that Ibsen has brought upon the stage have one unfailing characteristic: they are intensely interesting. They are not mere puppets moved here and there by the visible hand of the playwright; they are human beings, alive in every nerve, and obeying their own volition. The breath of life has been breathed into them; they may be foolish or morbid, headstrong or perverse, illogical or fanatic, none the less are they real, vital, actual. And this is the reason why actors are ever eager for the chance to act them. Where Scribe and Sardou and the manufacturers of the "well-made play" give the performers only effective parts, to be presented as skilfully as might be, Ibsen has proffered to them genuine characters to get inside of as best they could,--characters not easy to personate, indeed, often obscure and dangerous. Because of this danger and this doubt, they are all the more tempting to the true artist, who is ever on the alert for a tussle with technical difficulty. The men and women who people Ibsen's plays are never what the slang of the stage terms "straight parts"; they are never the traditional "leading man" and "leading woman"; in a sense they are all of them, male and female, young and old, "character parts," complex, illusive, alluring. They are not readily mastered, for they keep on revealing fresh possibilities the more searchingly they are studied; and this is why the reward is rich, when the actor has been able at last to get inside of them.
Even when he has done this, when he has put himself into "the skin of the personage" (to borrow the illuminating French phrase), the actor cannot be certain that his personation is finally right. No one of Ibsen's characters is presented in profile only, imposing its sole interpretation on the baffled performer. Every one of them is rounded and various, like a man in real life, to be seen from contradictory angles and to be approached from all sides. No one is a silhouette; and every one is a chameleon, changing color even while we are looking at it. Every part is a problem to the actors who undertake it, a problem with many a solution, no one of which can be proved, however assured the performer may be that he has hit on the right one. To the actor the privilege of an artistic adventure like this comes but rarely; and it is prized accordingly. Not often does he find under his hand material at once fresh and solid. He feels the fascination of this chance and he lays hold of it firmly, even tho he has a haunting fear of failure, absent from the easy, daily exercise of his professional skill. He relishes the opportunity to speak Ibsen's wonderful prose, that dialog which seems to the mere reader direct and nervous, and which impresses the actual auditor in the theater as incomparable in its veracity, its vivacity, its flexibility, its subtlety, and its certainty; but which only the actor who delivers it on the stage can praise adequately, since he alone is aware of its full force, of its surcharged meaning, and of its carrying power.
To act Ibsen is worth while, so the actors themselves think; and it is significant that it is to the actors, rather than to the regular managers, that we owe the most of our chances for seeing his plays presented on the stage. That Ibsen offers opportunities not provided in the pieces of any other modern dramatist is the belief of many an actor and of many an actress longing for a chance to rival the great performers who have gone before, leaving only their fame behind them. So it is that the 'Pillars of Society' is set up in our theaters now and _again_, and that 'Ghosts' may revisit our stage from time to time. So it is that the ambitious leading lady, abandoning the _Camille_ and the _Pauline_ of a generation or two ago, yearns now to show what she can do as _Nora_ and as _Hedda Gabler_, unable to resist the temptation to try her luck also in impersonating these women of the North, essentially feminine even when they are fatally enigmatic.
VIII
The actors and actresses do get their chance now and again to appear in an Ibsen part, in spite of the reluctance of the regular managers to risk the production of Ibsen's plays in their theaters. This reluctance is not caused solely by an inability to appreciate his real merits; it is magnified by a healthy distrust for the cranks and the freaks who are most vociferous and least intelligent in praise of him,--for Ibsen, like Browning and like Maeterlinck, has suffered severely from the fulsome adulation of the short-haired women and the long-haired men, who are ever exuberantly uncritical. Perhaps the unwillingness of managers to venture their money in staging these Scandinavian social dramas is due also to a well-founded belief that "there is no money in them,"--that they are not likely to attract American playgoers in remunerative multitudes,--that they cannot be forced to the long runs to which the theater is now unfortunately committed.
Ibsen is like all other great dramatists in that he has intended his plays to be performed in the theater, by actors, before an audience; and, therefore has he adjusted them most adroitly to the picture-frame stage of the modern playhouse and filled them with characters amply rewarding the utmost endeavor of ambitious players. But the influence of the actor and of the circumstances of the theater is only upon the outward form of the play, while the influence of the spectator is upon its content solely. This influence has been potent upon every true dramatist, who has had ever in mind the special audience for whom his plays were intended, and at whom they were aimed. Sophocles composed his stately tragedies for the cultivated citizens of Athens, seated on the curving hillside under the shadow of the Acropolis; Shakspere prepared his histories and his comedies to hold the interest of the turbulent throng which stood about the jutting platform in the yard of the half-roofed Tudor theater; and Moliere, even when he was writing to order for Louis XIV, never forgot the likings of the fun-loving burghers of Paris. No one of the three ever lookt beyond his own time or wasted a thought upon any other than the contemporary audience in his own city. Even tho their plays have proved to possess universality and permanence, they were in the beginning frankly local in their appeal.
But who are the spectators that Ibsen saw in his mind's eye when he imagined his plays bodied forth in the actual theater? He was not a citizen of a great state, as Moliere was, and Shakspere; he did not dwell in a great city, exercising his art in close contact with the abounding life of a metropolis. He was a native of a small country, not even independent, and without large towns; he was born in a petty village and there he grew to manhood; in his maturity he wandered abroad and for years abode in exile, an alien, if not a recluse.
Are not the memories of youth abiding? and can any one of us free himself wholly from the bonds of early environment? The audience that Ibsen has ever had in view when he was making his most searching tragedies of modern life, the audience he has always wisht to move and to rouse, morally and intellectually, was such a group of spectators as might gather in the tiny and isolated village where he had spent his boyhood. Ibsen himself may not have been conscious that this was the audience he was seeking to stimulate; indeed, he may never have suspected it; and he might even deny it in good faith. But the fact remains, nevertheless, obvious and indisputable; and it helps to explain not a little that might otherwise remain obscure. It enables us to suggest a reason for a certain closeness of atmosphere sometimes felt in this play or that, and for a certain lack of largeness of outlook, in spite of the depth of insight. It makes us more tolerant toward a certain narrowness, which is often provincial and sometimes almost parochial.
It is not merely that Ibsen's social dramas are all of them intensely Norwegian, peopled solely with natives and having the fiords ever present in the background. It is not merely that he has shrunk from all international contrasts, and from all cosmopolitanism;--and here, no doubt, he has chosen the better part. It is not that he himself has not shaken off the pettiness of the little village where he received his first impression of his fellow-man. It is that altho he has seen the world outside and altho he is thereby enabled to measure the smallness of what he left behind, he cannot forget the inhabitants of Grimstad, individually and collectively. They supply the constituent elements of the audience which he is ever addressing, consciously or unconsciously. It is their limited horizon he wants to enlarge; and it is their lethargy he is longing to shatter.
IX
Perhaps there is no injustice in holding that much of Ibsen's arrogant and aggressive individualism and self-assertion, is the result of his own youthful solitude and struggle in the little village where the druggist's ambitious apprentice who wrote poetry and who had opinions of his own, soon managed to get on a war-footing with most of his neighbors,--as the late Professor Boyesen recorded from his own observations at the time, explaining that "a small town, where everybody is interested in what his neighbor has for dinner, is invariably more intolerant of dissent, more tyrannical toward social rebels, than a city of metropolitan rank." And even when Ibsen removed to Christiania he did not get out of this atmosphere of pettiness. As Professor Boyesen remarked, again from personal experience, "One hundred thousand village souls do not make a city." And the same compatriot of the dramatist, in dealing with the 'Enemy of the People' declared that "each trait bears the indelible mark of a small society, which stunts and cripples the sons of men, making them crabbed and crooked, when in a richer soil many of them might have shot boldly up in the sunlight."
Norway seems to be a land of villages, with a people not yet enlarged and awakened from stifling bigotry. Its social organization still presses painfully on those who wish to do their own thinking; and half a century ago in Ibsen's impressionable youth, the pressure must have been tragic. There is no call for wonder that he should have reacted violently against these fettering restrictions. There is no need to speculate on the reasons why he has failed to feel the extraordinary delicacy of the problem of the equilibrium between the opposing forces, which have a cramping socialism on the one side and an exuberant anarchy on the other. His choice was swift and he exerted his strength unhesitatingly against the chains which had clanked on his limbs in his early manhood. He knew only too well and by bitter experience the hardness of the crust that encased the Norwegian community and he felt the need of blows still harder to break thru and let in a little light. And this is why he is so emphatic in his individualism; this is why he is so fiercely violent in his assertion of the right of every man to own himself and to obey his own will, contemptuous of the social bond which alone holds civilization together.
It is Boyesen, a fellow Norwegian and an ardent admirer of Ibsen's, who has most clearly stated Ibsen's position: "He seems to be in ill humor with humanity and the plan of creation in general (if, indeed, he recognized such a plan), and he devotes himself, with ruthless satisfaction, to showing what a paltry contemptible lot men are, and how aimless, futile, and irrational their existence is on this earth, with its chaotic strivings and bewildered endeavors." ... "Furthermore, he utterly undervalues what we call civilization, which he regards primarily as an ignominious compromise--a surrender and curtailment of our natural rights and liberties, in return for a paltry security for life and limb." ... "He has apparently no appreciation of the tremendous struggle, the immense suffering, the deluge of blood and tears, it has cost to redeem the world from that predatory liberty which he admires, and to build up gradually the safeguards of organized society which he so detests."
In other words, Ibsen is not what is called "an advanced thinker"; he is really the most extreme of reactionaries, because he wants to go back to the beginnings of civilization. He is willing to give up the chronometer and to return to the sun-dial.
It would be unfair, of course, to sustain what is here alleged by quoting speeches from his plays, since Ibsen is too completely a dramatist to use any one character merely as a mask thru the mouth of which he might voice his private opinion. But when we consider the whole group of the social dramas and when we disengage the philosophy underlying them and sustaining them, we may venture to deduce the private opinion of the author. And in his letters to Georg Brandes we find this opinion fearlessly exprest: "I have really never had any strong feeling of solidarity; in fact, I have only in a way accepted it as a traditional tenet of faith,--and if one had the courage to leave it out of consideration altogether, one would perhaps be rid of the worst ballast with which one's personality is burdened." In another letter he wrote: "I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not greatly concern me."
As Brandes points out, this attitude of Ibsen's is partly a reminiscence of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist. There is in Ibsen's writing an echo of that note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871. And the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching almost simultaneously in his correspondence with Brandes: "The state must be abolished.... Undermine the idea of the commonwealth; set up spontaneity and spiritual kinship as the sole determining points in a union; and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of some value." This sounds very like a return to Rousseau, almost a century after the futility of Rousseau's theories had been made manifest to all.
There is no denying, however, that Ibsen's doctrine is most appealing to a dramatist, whose business it is to set on the stage the strivings of the individual. Perhaps the drama would be the one surviving art if anarchy should come,--just as it would be certain to die slowly if socialism should succeed. The self-subordination of socialism would be as deadening as the self-surrender of fatalism to that will-power which must ever be the mainspring of a play to move the multitude. Altho it cannot formulate what it feels, the multitude has no relish for extreme measures; it may be making up its mind to turn toward either anarchy or socialism; but it means to move very slowly and it refuses to be hurried.
Here is a reason why Ibsen's plays are never likely to be broadly popular in the theater. The anarchistic element they contain helps to make them more dramatic, no doubt, more vigorous and more vital; but it is dimly perceived by the plain people who form the crowd of theater-goers, and by them it is dumbly resented. The excessive individualism which gives to Ibsen's best plays their tensity of interest is also the cause of their inacceptability to the multitude shrinking from any surrender of the hard won conquests of civilization. There is significance in the fact that Ibsen's plays have totally failed to establish themselves permanently in France, where the esthetic appreciation of his mastery of his art has been keenest and most competent, but where also the value of the social compact is most clearly understood. Not only in France, but in all other countries governed by the Latin tradition of solidarity, Ibsen's doctrine was certain to be unwelcome--even if it might be wholesome. Outside of Scandinavia it is only in Germany that Ibsen has succeeded in winning acceptance as a popular dramatist, perhaps because it was there that the doctrine of individualism was most needed. In Great Britain, and in the United States, where the individual has his rights, altho with no relaxing of the social bond, the performances of Ibsen's plays have been surprisingly infrequent when we consider their delightful craftsmanship, their indisputable power and their unfailing interest.
X
After all, it is not as a philosopher that Ibsen demands attention, but as a dramatist, as a playwright who is also a poet. If it is his weakness that his theory of life is overstrenuous, one-sided and out of date, it is his strength that he has opinions of his own and that he is willing to face the problems that insistently confront us to-day. As Mr. Archer has put it tersely and conclusively, Ibsen is "not pessimist or optimist or primarily a moralist, tho he keeps thinking about morals. He is simply a dramatist, looking with piercing eyes at the world of men and women, and translating into poetry this episode and that from the inexhaustible pageant."
A moralist he must be, if his work is to have any far-reaching significance, any final value. Morality is not something a poet can put into his work deliberately; but it can be left out only at the poet's peril, since few works of art are likely to be worth while if they are ethically empty. Ibsen's inspiration is too rich for it to be void of moral purport, even tho the playwright may not have intended all that we read into his work. There is a moral in 'Ghosts' as there is in 'OEdipus,' in the 'Scarlet Letter,' and in 'Anna Karenina,'--a moral, austere and dispassionate. It contains much that is unpleasant and even painful, but--to quote Arnold's praise of 'Anna Karenina'--nothing "of a nature to trouble the senses or to please those who wish their senses troubled." Ibsen's play, like the tragedy of Sophocles, like the severe stories of Hawthorne and Tolstoi, is not spoon-meat for babes; it is not for young men and maidens; but as Goethe asked nearly a century ago, "What business have our young girls at the theater? They do not belong to it;--they belong to the convent; and the theater is only for men and women who know something of human affairs." It is for these men and these women that Ibsen, with stern self-control, has written his social dramas, that he may force them to look into matters they are willing enough to ignore and to front the facts of life, ugly as these may be.
More than once in the course of this essay has there been occasion to evoke the names of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Moliere, the supreme masters of the dramatic art. To venture upon any comparison with them is to measure Ibsen by the loftiest standard. In his technic alone can he withstand the comparison, for he is the latest and he has profited by all the experiments and achievements of the strong men who came before him; in mere craftsmanship he is beyond question the foremost of all the moderns. It must be said also that in his intellectual honesty, in his respect for the immitigable laws of character, he rarely falls short. He lacks the clear serenity of Sophocles, the depth and the breadth of the myriad-minded Shakspere, the humorous toleration of Moliere. The great Greek, the great Englishman, and the great Frenchman, are, all of them, liberal and sane and wholesome, whatever their subject-matter may be; and here it is that the Scandinavian is felt to be inferior. There are few of his social dramas in which we cannot find more than a hint of abnormal eccentricity or of morbid perversity; and this is the reason why the most of them fail to attain the dignity of true and lofty tragedy.
Perhaps it is with Wagner that Ibsen should be grouped, rather than with Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere. They are the two master-spirits of the stage in the nineteenth century. They are both of them consummate craftsmen, having assimilated every profitable device of their predecessors and having made themselves chiefs, each in his own art. And yet with all their witchery and all their power, we may doubt whether their work will resist the criticism of the twentieth century, because there is at the core of it an exaggeration or disproportion which the future is likely to perceive more and more clearly in the receding perspective of time.
(1905.) _