Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (337 page)

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First, then, we take a series of poems in which the lyric motive is strongly felt. The
Bird Ballad
(III) is characterized by a light touch of playfulness rare in Ibsen, a humour and pathos habitual to him, and a profession of indifference in which he often takes refuge from the unkindness of fortune. Some of the same motives, treated with the same light hand, appear in the second of the group,
Complications
(iv). But it was not always that Ibsen could meet the irony of fate in so gentle and tender a spirit as he displays in this charming poem. With the
Water-Lily
(v) and the
Swan
(vi) we enter upon Ibsen’s own territory. In the first of these the “sprite.” already lurks beneath the petals of the water-lily, and in the second we have a genuine specimen of Ibsen’s pregnant, allusive, and often obscure style, which sometimes forces the translator to give a definite interpretation to what the original leaves as an open challenge, The next poem,
Gone
(vii), startles us by the feeling that under other conditions Ibsen might have rivalled Heine in the art of conveying the most vivid impressions and appeals to universal experience in words of such absolute simplicity that one cannot see by what magic they escape the bald and commonplace. This is one of the poems that drew forth the dictum of Brandes already recorded; and perhaps Garrett attained no subtler triumph than in his rendering of it.

The next poem (VIII) is one of the two (the other being xix) in which Ibsen speaks frankly of his wife, in their first love, and when their union had borne the long test and strain of the baffled and struggling life that preceded the poet’s fame and triumph. The three poems that follow (IX, X and XI) again strike the romantic note. The last of them, Th
e Eider-Duck, has,
I believe, been very generally regarded as a personal poem in which Ibsen compares himself, lacerated by the neglect or hostility of his countrymen, and driven into a half voluntary exile in Southern lands, to the robbed and bleeding bird. But at most this can only have been an afterthought, affecting the final revision of the last lines of the poem; for it was written in 1851, thirteen years before Ibsen left Norway.

The subsequent revisions, by which it was reduced from thirty-two to fourteen lines, concentrated and refined its forlorn beauty, and the final reference to the sunlit South seems only to focus the whole pathos of the wonderful poem. It always contained a symbolic suggestion; and in its original form it elaborated the analogies of the fate of the bird and the fate of man something after the way of Burns in his Daisy or his Field Mouse epic. This element in the final revision is all concentrated in the two last lines, no doubt with a sense of personal fellowship. But the reader of the two versions will surely feel that so far as the final line indicates a mental identification in the poet’s mind between himself and the eider-duck, it has been read the wrong way round. It would be far truer to say that Ibsen drew a deeper sympathy with the bird from his own personal experience, and so gave the final touch of beauty to one of the most perfect of his poems, than that in morbid sensitiveness he deformed the romantic poem of his earlier days into a querulous self-advertisement. Such penetrating and compelling beauty as is here can never flow from tainted sources; and if Ibsen is indeed the eider-duck, then never has “the fisherman.” treated him more cruelly than in ravishing with his vulgar hand this choicest “treasure.” In any case
To the Survivors
(XII) shows that Ibsen’s keenest resentment of what he felt to be unmerited neglect or hostility was roused not when he himself, but when another was the supposed victim; and the song in celebration of Professor Schweigaard’s jubilee (XIII) (of which a part only was translated by Garrett) shows us that as late as i860 Ibsen was far from taking a gloomy view of the future of his country, or from launching a general sentence of excommunication on his countrymen.

As for his own difficulties he was still undaunted. His genius had, indeed, received but little recognition and his life was a struggle with obstacles of every kind. But, however it sobered him and whatever darker moods he passed through, he was, in the main, confident of his mission. To borrow the imagery of his own Peer Gynt, he was quite certain that when God made him he meant something definite and something significant, and he, Ibsen, had a sufficient working knowledge of what that meaning was to be able to go on expressing it with determined confidence, whether men heard or whether they forbore. But now that most terrible experience to a patriotic soul came to Ibsen — the conviction that the country he loved, and in which his whole life was rooted, had betrayed its trust. We need not enter into the rights and wrongs of the Dano-Prussian war. It is a consolation, in any case, to know that the re-birth of Denmark itself is thought by many to date from that period; but those Englishmen who remember how at the wedding of the late King we all of us sang: “The Danish flag and England’s henceforth float side by side,” and then, when the test came, explained that what was understood to be our joint guarantee of Denmark’s independence did not bind us singly, will understand something of Ibsen’s feelings when the Scandinavian brethren of the Danes, who had all but pledged themselves to make common cause with them, allowed them to fight and fall alone.

The iron entered into his soul. The several poems translated by Garrett in which Ibsen utters his grief and indignation at what he held to be the betrayal of Denmark by her northern brethren, will give the reader the key to much that may have appeared obscure, or at least wanting in definiteness of outline, in the great drama of
Brand.
The hero’s dismal forebodings for his country, when his own catastrophe is approaching, are to be interpreted by the events expressly dealt with in these poems; and the passionate demand for action “up to the measure of accorded might,” irrespective of the practical limitations on which prudence insists, is of the very texture of the drama. There can be no doubt either that the braggart Peer Gynt, with his pretensions to ancestral grandeur, his splendid and ineffective visions of his own future, the sordid contrast of his actual conduct, the deathless hope of the woman who loved him and with whom alone God shared the secret of what he meant when he made him, is Ibsen’s scornful and yet yearning portrayal of the national character of the Norwegians, as it appeared to him in these days; and many a detailed stroke of sarcasm opens to the same key.

Jatgeir, in the
Pretenders
, declares that he became a bard because of the gift of sorrow, given him by a woman. He adds that the gift of doubt, if it be strong, and doubt not itself, may likewise make a bard, if that chance to be the gift he needs. When we consider that
Brand
and
Peer Gynt,
as well as many of the poems that now follow in our arrangement, were struck out of Ibsen’s grief and indignation, and that the whole series of the Social Plays are a relentless probing and questioning, in which the poet of doubt shows himself the peer of the great poets of faith, we may well ask whether Ibsen did not receive both the gift assured to Jatgeir and the gift denied to King Skule.

The poems directly referring to the Danish war (xiv, xv and xvi) are severally accompanied by short explanatory notes. They are followed by another group in which a more personal note is struck.

The Power of Memory
(XVII) illustrates by a grotesque and bitter parable the relation between sorrow and song. And
Burnt Ships
(xvm) reveals the truth which interprets all Ibsen’s work that though he seemed in a sense to have exiled himself from his country and shaken off her dust from his feet, he was nevertheless always and in all things deeply and ineradicably Norwegian.

Whatever message he had for the world was always delivered, spiritually speaking, from Norwegian soil and in Norwegian speech.

It is pleasant to add No xix, at the close of this group of poems, as a companion to No. VIII, and to have its direct testimony to the fact, abundantly known from other sources, that through all his struggles and disappointments Ibsen found sympathy, understanding and support just where the want of them would have struck the most deadly blow.

We have seen some of the indications of the lyric exuberance which might have been Ibsen’s had the lines of his life fallen otherwise than they did. And even the period of darkness of which we have now been speaking was one of unusual lyrical productivity.

But nevertheless the disappointment and indignation which dominated it had fixed upon Ibsen’s youthful animation the taciturnity and reserve which became so markedly characteristic of him. His faultlessly correct manners and costume, and his scrupulous, even conventional, politeness, were perhaps a kind of defensive armour. Readers who have formed their conceptions of him as the great rebel against all conventions, usually find this correctness rather startling when they first hear of it, and Ibsen himself apparently was quite conscious of the contrast between what God had originally made him, and still meant by him, inside, and what life had made of him externally; so that a glance at the looking-glass might chill the current of his thoughts as though by the presence of a stranger. So at least he seems to confess in
A Home Study
(xx). But possibly we are driving too hard the sense, not peculiar to Ibsen, of a contrast between the free movements of the soul and the concrete and clothed personality which must necessarily seem inadequate or grotesque if regarded as its symbolic expression. And yet the same sense of a divided and self-baffling nature breathes in
The Petrel
(xxi), reminding us of the contention of Mephistopheles in the
Prologue in Heaven,
that man would do well enough if he could either fly or could be content to give up jumping.

But when all this is said something more specific remains to be reckoned with in Ibsen. The secret of his power alike of attraction and of repulsion is perhaps to be found in his indomitable sense of vitality, coupled with his growing incapacity to express it otherwise than in negations. He always seemed to be diving into the darkness. Bjornson has said of him that he is like the lighthouses on the Norway coast. They show folk where
not
to sail, and they are the first things that any one sees when his eye is turned to Norway.

Ibsen’s searching analysis of how not to do it strikes those who have less inherent sense of the worth of life than he as amounting to a terrible fatalism, whereas to those who share his vital force (and who had more of it than Garrett?) they are what they ought to be — a warning to enable a man to sail more safely, not a proclamation that he who sails on the sea of life sails to inevitable wreck.

But yet, for all his sense of the worth of life, that “fight with trolls” of which he was so deeply conscious indicates some exceptional feeling in Ibsen’s soul of a hostile power which cramped and conditioned his self-expression; and his most fervent admirers must often feel that he was a haunted man, that he was in some sense possessed, that he had paid a terrible price for his insight and his achievement, and that though he was always seeking to break through to the light, he was often beset by a doubt whether darkness might not after all be the natural abode of man. It is not only in his later work, but in poems of almost every date, that we feel this spirit. That mysterious and fascinating poem
Musicians
(XXII) gives hints, which the reader may shape according to his fancy, to support or refute these contentions, but in the
Bird and Bird-catcher
(XXIII) Ibsen reveals himself clearly enough as scared and bruised by the grim powers that encompass him. In
The Daylight Coward
(XXIV), which the reader will compare with a passage in
Brand
(p. 75), he tries (at least dramatically) to find his reconciliation with life in the thought that man is born to darkness, and can only be happy when he renounces his insane desire to live in the sunshine. In
The Miner
(xxv) we find him persistently working deeper into the darkness with an only half-retained conviction that it is the true path to light. But in that terrible poem
On the Fells
(xxvi) we have a conscious working out of this theory, together with a
reductio ad absurdum
of the belief that by hardening the heart and cultivating an artistic attitude of aloofness you can win emancipation.

As a sort of pendant to this group we give the declaration to his “Friend the Revolutionary Orator” (xxvi) — apparently a
reductio ad absurdum
of the said friend’s creed also — that the only true reformation would consist in a second Deluge supplemented by the scuttling of the Ark!

At the end we have placed in detachment the ballad of
Terje Vigen
(xxv 111).

P. H. W.

Ibsen’s poetry in the original Norwegian can be accessed here

The Poems of Henrik Ibsen

Translated by Fydell Edmund Garrett

CONTENTS