Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (68 page)
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Authors: Henrik Ibsen
STIVER.
And you complacently can see your house
With little Strawmans every year augmented.
STRAWMAN
[Rubbing his hands with satisfaction and looking
after FALK]
.
Insolent fellow! Well, it served him right; —
Would all these knowing knaves were in his plight!
[They go across in conversation; MRS. HALM
approaches with SVANHILD.
MRS. HALM
[aside eagerly]
.
And nothing binds you?
SVANHILD.
Nothing.
MRS. HALM.
Good, you know
A daughter’s duty —
SVANHILD.
Guide me, I obey.
MRS. HALM.
Thanks, child. [Pointing to GULDSTAD.
He is rich and
comme il faut
Parti
; and since there’s nothing in the way —
SVANHILD.
Yes, there is one condition I require! —
To leave this place.
MRS. HALM.
Precisely his desire.
SVANHILD.
And time —
MRS. HALM.
How long? Bethink you, fortune’s calling!
SVANHILD
[with a quiet smile]
.
Only a little; till the leaves are falling.
[She goes towards the verandah; MRS. HALM seeks
out GULDSTAD.
STRAWMAN
[among the guests]
.
One lesson, friends, we learn from this example!
Tho’ Doubt’s beleaguering forces hem us in,
The Truth upon the Serpents’s head shall trample,
The cause of Love shall win —
GUESTS.
Yes, Love shall win!
[They embrace and kiss, pair by pair. Outside to
the left are heard song and laughter.
MISS JAY.
What can this mean?
ANNA.
The students!
LIND.
The quartette,
Bound for the mountains; — and I quite forgot
To tell them —
[The STUDENTS come in to the left and remain
standing at the entrance.
A STUDENT
[to LIND]
.
Here we are on the spot!
MRS. HALM.
It’s Lind you seek, then?
MISS JAY.
That’s unfortunate.
He’s just engaged —
AN AUNT.
And so, you may be sure,
He cannot think of going on a tour.
THE STUDENTS.
Engaged!
ALL THE STUDENTS.
Congratulations!
LIND
[to his comrades]
.
Thanks, my friends!
THE STUDENT
[to his comrades]
.
There goes our whole fish-kettle in the fire!
Our tenor lost! No possible amends!
FALK [Coming from the right, in summer suit, with student’s cap, knapsack and stick.
I’ll
sing the tenor in young Norway’s choir!
THE STUDENTS.
You, Falk! hurrah!
FALK.
Forth to the mountains, come!
As the bee hurries from her winter home!
A twofold music in my breast I bear,
A cither with diversely sounding strings,
One for life’s joy, a treble loud and clear,
And one deep note that quivers as it sings.
[To individuals among the STUDENTS.
You have the palette? — You the note-book? Good,
Swarm then, my bees, into the leafy wood,
Till at night-fall with pollen-laden thigh,
Home to our mighty mother-queen we fly!
[Turning to the company, while the STUDENTS depart and
and the Chorus of the First Act is faintly heard outside.
Forgive me my offences great and small, I resent nothing; — [Softly. but remember all.
STRAWMAN
[beaming with happiness]
.
Now fortune’s garden once again is green!
My wife has hopes, — a sweet presentiment —
[Draws him whispering apart.
She lately whispered of a glad event —
[Inaudible words intervene.
If all goes well . . . at Michaelmas . . . thirteen!
STIVER [With MISS JAY on his arm, turning to FALK, smiles triumphantly, and says, pointing to STRAWMAN: I’m going to start a household, flush of pelf!
MISS JAY
[with an ironical courtesy]
.
I shall put on my wedding-ring next Yule.
ANNA
[similarly, as she takes LIND’s arm]
.
My Lind will stay, the Church can mind itself —
LIND
[hiding his embarrassment]
.
And seek an opening in a ladies’ school.
MRS. HALM.
I cultivate my Anna’s capabilities —
GULDSTAD
[gravely]
.
An unromantic poem I mean to make
Of one who only lives for duty’s sake.
FALK
[with a smile to the whole company]
.
I go to scale the Future’s possibilities!
Farewell! [Softly to SVANHILD.
God bless thee, bride of my life’s dawn,
Where’er I be, to nobler deed thou’lt wake me.
[Waves his hat and follows the STUDENTS.
SVANHILD [Looks after him a moment, then says softly but firmly:
Now over is my life, by lea and lawn,
The leaves are falling; — now the world may take me.
[At this moment the piano strikes up a dance, and champagne corks explode in the background. The gentlemen hurry to and fro with their ladies on their arms. GULDSTAD approaches SVANHILD and bows: she starts momentarily, then collects herself and gives him her hand. MRS. HALM and her family, who have watched the scene in suspense, throng about them with expressions of rapture, which are overpowered by the music and the merriment of the dancers in the garden.
[But from the country the following chorus rings loud and defiant through the dance music:
CHORUS OF FALK AND THE STUDENTS.
And what if I shattered my roaming bark,
It was passing sweet to be roaming!
MOST OF THE COMPANY.
Hurrah!
[Dance and merriment; the curtain falls.
Translated by William Archer
This play was written in 1863 and it is assumed that Ibsen was inspired by reading the third volume of P. A. Munch’s
The History of the Norwegian People
(1857), which dealt with the civil wars from Sverre’s appearance in 1177 until the fall of Duke Skule in 1240. However, Ibsen put aside this subject in order to work on
Love’s Comedy
, which he did not finish until the autumn of 1862. On June 1st he was released from his engagement at the theatre and he was then able to resume his work on
The Pretenders
in the winter of 1862. However it was still a relatively long time before he completed the work. The play opened at the old Christiania Theatre on 19 January, 1864 and Ibsen himself directed the first performance.
Although it received a lukewarm response from critics, it was received very positively by the audience.
The play is set in the thirteenth-century and revolves around the historical conflict between Norwegian King Håkon Håkonsson and his father-in-law; Earl Skule Bårdsson. The portrayed relationship has been commonly ascribed to the rivalry between Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who had succeeded Ibsen as director of the Norske Theater in 1857.
Håkon Håkonsson reigned as king of Norway from 1217 to
Margrete Skulesdatter (1208–1270) was a Norwegian Queen and spouse of King Håkon IV.
Six years elapsed between the composition of
The Vikings
and that of
The Pretenders.
In the interval Ibsen wrote
Love’s Comedy
, and brought all the world of Norwegian philistinism, and (as we should now say) suburbanism, about his ears. Whereas hitherto his countrymen had ignored, they now execrated him. In his autobiographic letter of 1870, to Peter Hansen, he wrote: “The only person who at that time approved of the book was my wife.... My countrymen excommunicated me. All were against me. The fact that all were against me — that there was no longer any one outside my own family circle of whom I could say ‘He believes in me’ — must, as you can easily see, have aroused a mood which found its outlet in
The Pretenders.’”
It is to be noted that this was written during a period of estrangement from Bjørnson. I do not know what was Bjørnson’s attitude towards
Love’s Comedy
in particular; but there can be no doubt that, in general, he believed in and encouraged his brother poet, and employed his own growing influence in efforts to his advantage. In representing himself as standing quite alone, Ibsen probably forgets, for the moment, his relation to his great contemporary.
Yet the relation to Bjørnson lay at the root of the character-contrast on which
The Pretenders
is founded.
Ibsen always insisted that each of his plays gave poetic form to some motive gathered from his own experience or observation; and this is very clearly true of the present play. Ever since
Synnove Solbakken
had appeared in 1857, Bjørnson, the expansive, eloquent, lyrical Bjørnson, had been the darling child of fortune. He had gone from success to success unwearied. He was recognised throughout Scandinavia (in Denmark no less than in Norway) as the leader of the rising generation in almost every branch of imaginative literature. He was full, not only of inspiration and energy, but of serene self-confidence. Meanwhile Ibsen, nearly five years older than he, had been pursuing his slow and painful course of development, in comparative obscurity, in humiliating poverty, and amid almost complete lack of appreciation. “Mr. Ibsen is a great cipher” (or “nullity”), wrote a critic in 1858; another, in 1863, laid it down that “Ibsen has a certain technical and artistic talent, but nothing of what can be called ‘genius.’” The scoffs of the critics, however, were not the sorest trials that he had to bear. What was hardest to contend against was the doubt as to his own poetic calling and election that constantly beset him.
This doubt could not but be generated by the very tardiness of his mental growth. We see him again and again (in the case of
Olaf Liliekrans
, of
The Vikings,
of
Love’s
Comedy,
and of
The Pretenders
itself), conceiving a plan and then abandoning it for years — no doubt because he found himself, in one respect or another, unripe for its execution. Every such experience must have involved for him days and weeks of fruitless effort and discouragement. To these moods of scepticism as to his own powers he gave expression in a series of poems (for the most part sonnets) published in 1859 under the title of
In the Picture Gallery.
In it he represents the “black elf” of doubt, whispering to him: “Your soul is like the dry bed of a mountain stream, in which the singing waters of poetry have ceased to flow. If a faint sound comes rustling down the empty channel, do not imagine that it portends the return of the waters — it is only the dry leaves eddying before the autumn wind, and pattering among the barren stones.” In those years of struggle and stress, of depressing criticism, and enervating self-criticism, he must often have compared his own lot and his own character with Bjørnson’s, and perhaps, too, wondered whether there were no means by which he could appropriate to himself some of his younger and more facile brother-poet’s kingly self-confidence. For this relation between two talents he partly found and partly invented a historic parallel in the relation between two rival pretenders to the Norwegian throne, Håkon Håkonsson and Skule Bârdsson.
Dr. Brandes, who has admirably expounded the personal element in the genesis of this play, compares Håkon-Bjørnson and Skule-Ibsen with the Aladdin and Nureddin of Oehlenschliiger’s beautiful dramatic poem. Aladdin is the born genius, serene, light-hearted, a trifle shallow, who grasps the magic lamp with an unswerving confidence in his right to it. (“It is that which the Romans called
ingenium
,” says Bishop Nicholas, “truly I am not strong in Latin; but ‘twas called
ingenium.”)
Nureddin, on the other hand, is the far profounder, more penetrating, but sceptical and self-torturing spirit. When at last he seizes Aladdin’s lamp, as Skule annexes Håkon’s king’s thought, his knees tremble, and it drops from his grasp, just as the Genie is ready to obey him.
It is needless to cite the passages from the scenes between Skule and Bishop Nicholas in the second act, Skule and Håkon in the third, Skule and Jatgeir in the fourth, in which this element of personal symbolism is present.
The reader will easily recognise them, while recognising at the same time that their dramatic appropriateness, their relevance to the historic situation as the poet viewed it, is never for a moment impaired. The underlying meaning is never allowed to distort or denaturalise the surface aspect of the picture. The play may be read, understood, and fully appreciated, by a person for whom this underlying meaning has no existence. One does not point it out as an essential element in the work of art or even as adding to its merit, but simply as affording a particularly clear instance of Ibsen’s method of interweaving “Wahrheit” with “Dichtung.”
So early as 1858, soon after the completion of
The Vikings,
Ibsen had been struck by the dramatic material in Håkon
Håkonsson’s Saga,
as related by Snorri Sturlasson’s nephew, Sturla Thordsson, and had sketched a play on the subject. At that time, however, he put the draft aside. It was only as the years went on, as he found himself “excommunicated” after
Love’s Comedy
, and as the contrast between Bjørnson’s fortune and his own became ever more marked, that the figures of Skule and Håkon took more and more hold upon his imagination. In June, 1863, he attended a “Festival of Song” at Bergen, and there met Bjørnson, who had been living abroad since 1860. Probably under the stimulus of this meeting, he set to work upon
The Pretenders
immediately on his return to Christiania, and wrote it with almost incredible rapidity. The manuscript went to the printers in September; the book was published in October, 1863 (though dated 1864), and the play was produced at the Christiania Theatre, under the author’s own supervision, on January 17, 1864. The production was notably successful; yet no one seems fully to have realised what it meant for Norwegian literature. Outside of Norway, at any rate, it awoke no echo. George Brandes declares that scarcely a score of copies of the play found their way to Denmark.
Not until Ibsen had left Norway (April, 1864) and had taken the Danish reading public by storm with
Brand
and
Peer Gynt
, did people turn back to
The Pretenders
and discover what an extraordinary achievement it was.
In January, 1871, it was produced at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, where Emil Poulsen found in Bishop Nicholas one of the great triumphs of his career. It was produced by the Meiningen Company and at the Munich Hoftheater in
The character of Nicholas has fascinated many great actors: what a pity that it did not come in the way of Sir Henry Irving when he was at the height of his power!
But of course no English actor-manager would dream of undertaking a character which dies in the middle of the third act.
Ibsen’s treatment of history in this play may be proposed as a model to other historic dramatists. Although he has invented a great deal, his inventions supplement rather than contradict the records. Chronology, indeed, he treats with considerable freedom, and at the same time with ingenious vagueness. The general impression one receives in reading the play is that the action covers a space of four or five years; as a matter of fact it covers twenty-two years, between the folkmote in Bergen, 1218, and Skule’s death, 1240. All the leading characters are historical; and although much is read into them which history does not warrant, there is little that history absolutely forbids us to conceive. The general features of the struggle between the two factions — Håkon’s Birkebeiner, or Birchlegs, and Skule’s Vargbælgs — are correctly enough reproduced. In his treatment of this period, the Norwegian historian, J. E. Sars, writing thirteen years after the appearance of
The Pretenders,
uses terms which might almost have been suggested by Ibsen’s play. “On the one side,” he says, “we find strength and certainty, on the other lameness and lack of confidence.
The old Birchlegs go to work openly and straightforwardly, like men who are immovably convinced of the justice of their cause, and unwaveringly assured of its ultimate victory. Skule’s adherents, on the other hand, are ever seeking by intrigues and chicanery to place stumbling-blocks in the way of their opponents’ enthusiasm.” Håkon represented Sverre’s ideal of a democratic kingship, independent of the oligarchy of bishops and barons. “He was,” says Sars, “reared in the firm conviction of his right to the Throne; he grew up among the veterans of his grandfather’s time, men imbued with Sverre’s principles, from whom he accepted them as a ready-made system, the realisation of which could only be a question of time. He stood from the first in a clear and straightforward position to which his whole personality corresponded.... He owed his chief strength to the repose and equilibrium of mind which distinguished him, and had its root in his unwavering sense of having right and the people’s will upon his side.” His great “king’s thought,” however, seems to be an invention of the poet’s.
Skule, on the other hand, represented the old nobility in its struggle against the new monarchy. “He was the centre of a hierarchic aristocratic party; but after its repeated defeats this party must have been lacking alike in number and in confidence.... It was clear from the first that his attempt to reawaken the old wars of the succession in Norway was undertaken in the spirit of the desperate gambler, who does not count the chances, but throws at random, in the blind hope that luck may befriend him.... Skule’s enterprise had thus no support in opinion or in any prevailing interest, and one defeat was sufficient to crush him.”
In the character of Bishop Nicholas, too, Ibsen has widened and deepened his historical material, rather than poetised with a free hand. “Bishop Nicholas,” says Sars, “represented rather the aristocracy... than the cloth to which he belonged. He had begun his career as a worldly chieftain, and, as such, taken part in Magnus Erlingsson’s struggles with Sverre; and although he must have had some tincture of letters, since he could contrive to be elected a bishop... there is no lack of indications that his spiritual lore was not of the deepest. During his long participation in the civil broils, both under Sverre and later, we see in him a man to whose character any sort of religious or ecclesiastical enthusiasm must have been foreign, his leading motives being personal ambition and vengefulness rather than any care for general interests — a cold and calculating nature, shrewd but petty and without any impetus, of whom Håkon Håkonsson, in delivering his funeral speech... could find nothing better to say than that he had not his equal in worldly wisdom (
veraldar vit
).” I cannot find that the Bishop played any such prominent part in the struggle between the King and the Earl as Ibsen assigns to him; and the only foundation for the great death-bed scene seems to be the following passage from
Håkon Håkonsson’s Saga,
Cap. 138: “As Bishop Nicholas at that time lay very sick, he sent a messenger to the King praying him to (come to him. The King had on this expedition seized certain letters, from which he gathered that the Bishop had not been true to him. With this he upbraided him, and the Bishop, confessing it, prayed the King to forgive him. The King replied that he did so willingly, for God’s sake; and as he could discern that the Bishop lay near to death, he abode with him until God called him from the world.”
In the introduction to
The Vikings at Helgeland
, have suggested that in that play Ibsen had reached imaginative and technical maturity, but was as yet intellectually immature. The six years that elapsed between
The Vikings
and
The Pretenders
placed him at the height of his intellectual power. We have only to compare Skule, Håkon, and Bishop Nicholas with Gunnar, Sigurd, and Ornulf to feel that we have passed from nobly-designed and more or less animated waxworks to complex and profoundly studied human beings. There is no Hiordis in
The Pretenders,
and the female character-drawing is still controlled by purely romantic ideals; but how exquisitely human is Margrete in comparison with the almost entirely conventional Dagny! The criticism of life, too, which in
The Vikings
is purely sentimental, here becomes intense and searching. The only point of superiority in
The Vikings
— if it be a point of superiority — is purely technical. The action of the earlier play is concentrated and rounded. It has all the “unity,” or “unities,” that a rational criticism can possibly demand. In a word, it is, in form as well as essence, an ideal tragedy.
The Pretenders,
on the other hand, is a chronicle-play, far more close-knit than Shakespeare’s or Schiller’s works in that kind, but, nevertheless, what Aristotle would call “episodic” in its construction. The weaving of the plot, however, is quite masterly, betokening an effort of invention and adjustment incomparably greater than that which went to the making of
The Vikings.
It was doubtless his training in the school of French intrigue that enabled Ibsen to depict with such astonishing vigour that master wire-puller, Bishop Nicholas. This form of technical dexterity he was afterwards to outgrow and bring into disrepute. But from
The Vikings
to
Pillars of Society
he practised, whenever he was writing primarily for the stage, the methods of the “well-made play”; and in everything but concentration, which the very nature of the subject excluded,
The Pretenders
is thoroughly “wellmade.”
