Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (717 page)
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Authors: Henrik Ibsen
MUNICH, March 26th, 1889
My dear Professor:
EVERY day since my return have I thought of you and the other friends in Berlin, and intended to send you a few words. But during my absence there had accumulated such a stack of business letters that I have not yet quite mastered them all.
Still to-day I write a few preliminary words to ask that you accept and — when you have an opportunity — forward my most cordial thanks to our many mutual acquaintances who contributed toward making the week in Berlin the brightest time in my life. When I look back upon it, all seems to me like a dream. It makes me almost uneasy.
The following week I spent in Weimar. There also “The Lady from the Sea” was quite excellently played. The interpretation and representation of the characters had a strange resemblance to that at the Scliauspielhaus. Here Wangel, however, was not quite so finely finished in details. Nor was Lyngstrand so incomparably and truly conceived and individualized. But “The Strange Man” I cannot wish or hardly imagine better done than here — a tall, slender figure with the face of a hawk, piercing black eyes, and a splendid, deep, and subdued voice.
I have gone through my whole collection of books without finding any copy of the second edition of “Love’s Comedy,” in which the preface appears, — for in the later editions it is left out. I have therefore some days since written to Chief Clerk Larsen requesting him to secure a copy and send it to you. I hope he will succeed.
From Vienna I have received various letters, from which I can see that Dr. Schlenther’s lecture has had a strong effect there. And the strangest part is that these communications and declarations do not arise from German, but from Magyarian and Polish circles, the whole fundamental view of which, on life as well as on literature and its advancing aims, would seem to be so exceedingly divergent from our Germanic view. I suppose the explanation lies in the universality of the Germanic nature and the Germanic mind, which predestines it to a future empire of the world.
That I have been allowed to take part in these currents I clearly and deeply feel that I owe to my having entered into the life of German society.
I have to stop for to-day; hope soon to hear from you; send most cordial regards to our mutual circle, and am,
Yours truly and obligedly,
HENRIK IBSEN
P. S. — I wish to express gratefulness, particularly for Dr. Brahm’s article in
Frankfurter Zeitung
and for Dr. Schlenter’s in
Die Nation.
H. I.
(Letter XIX was first published in the Christiania daily,
Aftenposten,
May 26,1906.)
(Amandus Theodor Schibsted (born 1849), editor and owner of the Norwegian daily paper,
Aftenposten,
since 1879.)
MUNICH, March 27th, 1888
Mr. Editor Schibsted:
ALLOW me herewith to offer you my kindest and best thanks for the attention you have been good enough to show me by including in your paper for the twentieth of this month the series of articles published on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday.
I wish to assure you that I shall always be grateful for the pleasure which you have thereby given me. And this pleasure was so much the greater as it was unexpected.
One of the things that have pained me most in my literary relation to my home country is, that for a number of years, as far back as the appearance of “The League of Youth,” I have been appropriated by one or the other political party. I who never in my life have busied myself with politics, but only with social questions! And then the supposed opponents’ unwillingness to understand! It is not praise or adherence for which I thirst. But understanding! Understanding! The hand which you have kindly extended to me I am delighted to grasp, and sign myself,
Yours respectfully and obligedly,
HENRIK IBSEN
(Letters XX-XXII were first published in the Norwegian magazine
Samtiden,
February, 1908.)
(Helene Raff is a German artist whose acquaintance Ibsen had just made in Gossensass, and this letter is written in German.)
Late Friday night,
MUNICH, September 30th, 1889
Dear Child:
HOW kind, how lovable of you to visit us yesterday. My wife is so truly, heartily fond of you. And I too. As you sat there in the twilight and told us various things so thoughtfully and understandingly, do you know what I then thought, what I wished? No, that you do not know. I wished — Alas, if I only had such a dear and lovely daughter.
Come and see us again real soon. But in the mean time you must keep busy at work artist-like in your atelier. There you must not be disturbed for the present.
Blessings on your dear head,
Yours devotedly,
HENRIK IBSEN
(Miss Raff had given Ibsen, in 1890, as a birthday present, a sketch of a young girl’s head which he at once named Solveig.)
CHRISTIANIA, March 30th, 1892
Dearest Miss Raff:
ALLOW me to send you my warmest, my most heartfelt thanks for your kind letter, which reached me on my birthday, and also for your wonderfully charming picture, which I had the unspeakably great pleasure to receive a few days ago. It is now hung in a good place in my study, so that I may constantly satisfy myself by the view out over the broad, open sea, — and constantly increase my desire to meet the dear, dear lovely young girl who has created the beautiful little work of art. And who during its execution has thought of me from afar. Oh — if I might only have the opportunity to render thanks personally, thank you in such a way as I should like to. The sea I love. Your picture carries me in thought and sentiment to what I love. Yes, you have surely enriched me for life by what you have given me. Now little Solveig shall be hung beside the sea picture. Then I will have you wholly and altogether before me — and within me.
Such warm recollections of Munich arose in me when I received those remembrances in words and colors from you. How I should like to be down there again now. For I belong there so heartily.
But then there are so many things in life which place a restraint upon a man’s wishes and desires.
You have acquired an incredible ability in handling the Norwegian language. Do you never think of making a summer trip up here? To dream a bright fleeting summer night’s dream among the mountains or out by the sea?
Give me an answer to that some time, dearest Miss Raff. Will you? It would make me unspeakably happy — of course at your convenience — again to receive a few lines from you.
Yours truly and obligedly,
HENRIK IBSEN
(Mr. Ossip-Lourié is a French-Russian author whose book, “La Philosophic Sociale dans le Théatre d’Ibsen,” appeared in 1900.)
CHRISTIANIA, February 19th, 1899
Mr. Ossip-Lourié:
I AM much obliged to you for your kind offer of the plan to publish some thoughts extracted from my works, and with great pleasure grant the desired approval.
I only ask you to remember that the thoughts expressed in my dramas belong to my dramatic characters, who express them, and are not directly from me either in form or content.
Yours respectfully and obligedly,
HENRIK IBSEN
s
‘Everything which I have created as a poet,’ Ibsen said in a letter, ‘has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.’ Yet his chief aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and to stand aside, reserving his judgment. ‘The method, the technique of the construction,’ he says, speaking of what is probably his masterpiece,
Ghosts
, ‘in itself entirely precludes the author’s appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real.’ That, at his moment of most perfect balance, was his intention; that was what he achieved in an astonishing way. But his whole life was a development; and we see him moving from point to point, deliberately, and yet inevitably; reaching the goal which it was his triumph to reach, then going beyond the goal, because movement in any direction was a necessity of his nature.
In Ibsen’s letters we shall find invaluable help in the study of this character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard, crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow, precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he hated and resembled.
His creed, as man and as artist, was the cultivation, the realisation of self. In quite another sense that, too, was the creed of Nietzsche; but what in Nietzsche was pride, the pride of individual energy, in Ibsen was a kind of humility, or a practical deduction from the fact that only by giving complete expression to oneself can one produce the finest work. Duty to oneself: that was how he looked upon it; and though, in a letter to Björnson, he affirmed, as the highest praise, ‘his life was his best work,’ to himself it was the building-up of the artist in him that he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moral fervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of the abundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed his force, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times an uneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makes the most of his gold by scraping up every farthing?
‘The great thing,’ he says in a letter of advice, ‘is to hedge about what is one’s own, to keep it free and clear from everything outside that has no connexion with it.’ He bids Brandes cultivate ‘a genuine, full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what concerns you as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else as non-existent.’ Yet he goes on to talk about ‘benefiting society,’ is conscious of the weight which such a conviction or compromise lays upon him, and yet cannot get rid of the burden, as Nietzsche does. He has less courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back from a complete realisation of his own doctrine because he has so much worldly wisdom and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds.
‘In every new poem or play,’ he writes, ‘I have aimed at my own personal spiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.’ This queer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose main endeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventions and restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism which peep out in Ibsen again and again. ‘The strongest man,’ he says in a letter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, ‘is he who stands alone.’ But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he found pleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him is marked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, never writes to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels it necessary to avoid contact with ‘certain tendencies prevailing there.’ ‘Friends are an expensive luxury,’ he finds, because they keep him from doing what he wishes to do, out of consideration for them. Is not this intellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practical cold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, ‘I could never lead a consistent spiritual life there.’ In Norway he finds that ‘the accumulation of small details makes the soul small.’ How curious an admission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, and feels that he has discovered a new mental world. ‘After I had been in Italy I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I had been there.’ Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because ‘here one is too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day.’
He insists, again and again: ‘Environment has a great influence upon the forms in which the imagination creates’; and, in a tone of half-burlesque, but with something serious in his meaning, he declares that wine had something to do with the exaltation of
Brand
and
Peer Gynt
, and sausages and beer with the satirical analysis of
The League of Youth
. And he adds: ‘I do not intend by this to place the last-mentioned play on a lower level. I only mean that my point of view has changed, because here I am in a community well ordered even to weariness.’ He says elsewhere that he could only have written
Peer Gynt
where he wrote it, at Ischia and Sorrento, because it is ‘written without regard to consequences — as I only dare to write far away from home.’ If we trace him through his work we shall see him, with a strange docility, allowing not only ‘frame of mind and situation in life,’ but his actual surroundings, to mould his work, alike in form and in substance. If he had never left Norway he might have written verse to the end of his life; if he had not lived in Germany, where there is ‘up-to-date civilisation to study,’ he would certainly never have written the social dramas; if he had not returned to Norway at the end of his life, the last plays would not have been what they were. I am taking him at his word; but Ibsen is a man who must be taken at his word.
What is perhaps most individual in the point of view of Ibsen in his dramas is his sense of the vast importance trifles, of the natural human tendency to invent or magnify misunderstandings. A misunderstanding is his main lever of the tragic mischief; and he has studied and diagnosed this unconscious agent of destiny more minutely and persistently than any other dramatist. He found it in himself. We see just this brooding over trifles, this sensitiveness to wrongs, imaginary or insignificant, in the revealing pages of his letters. It made the satirist of his earlier years; it made him a satirist of non-essentials. A criticism of one of his books sets him talking of wide vengeance; and he admitted in later life that he said to himself, ‘I am ruined,’ because a newspaper had attacked him overnight.
With all his desire to ‘undermine the idea of the state,’ he besieges king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a letter, ‘I should very much like to write publicly about the mean behaviour of the government,’ which, however, he refrains from doing. He gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, even when he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on the calming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian bookseller threatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter of it. ‘If,’ he says, ‘this dishonest speculation really obtains sympathy and support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever all ties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again.’ How petty, how like a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possible trifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and even national moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well as bitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself (for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more than others) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol.
During the time I was writing
Brand
, I had on my desk a glass with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill. Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell furiously and emptied its poison into it — after which it was well again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets?
Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sick scorpion in the glass.
In one of his early letters to Björnson, he had written: ‘When I read the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.’ All his life Ibsen gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the black spot at the core of the earth’s fruit, of the whole apple of the earth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learned something of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the energy of the struggle that mattered. ‘He who possesses liberty,’ he said, ‘otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle and says, “Now I have it,” thereby shows that he has lost it.’ He had learned still more when he could add to his saying, ‘The minority is always right,’ this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual vanguard can never collect a majority around him. ‘At the point where I stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerably compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther ahead, I hope.’ ‘That man is right,’ he thought, ‘who has allied himself most closely with the future.’ The future, to Ibsen, was a palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a follower, with Zarathustra: ‘This is my road; which is yours?’ His future was to be peopled by great individuals.
It was in seeking to find himself that Ibsen sought to find truth; and truth he knew was to be found only within him. The truth which he sought for himself was not at all truth in the abstract, but a truth literally ‘efficacious,’ and able to work out the purpose of his existence. That purpose he never doubted. The work he had to do was the work of an artist, and to this everything must be subservient. ‘The great thing is to become honest and truthful in dealing with oneself — not to determine to do this or determine to do that, but to do what one
must
do because one is oneself. All the rest simply leads to falsehood.’ He conceives of truth as being above all clear-sighted, and the approach to truth as a matter largely of will. No preacher of God and of righteousness and the kingdom to come was ever more centred, more convinced, more impregnably minded every time that he has absorbed a new idea or is constructing a new work of art. His conception of art often changes; but he never deviates at any one time from any one conception. There is something narrow as well as something intense in this certainty, this calmness, this moral attitude towards art. Nowhere has he expressed more of himself than in a letter to a woman who had written some kind of religious sequel to
Brand
. He tells her:
Brand
is an æsthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me. It came into being as the result of something which I had not observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself from something which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic form to it; and, when by this means I had got rid of it, my book had no longer any interest for me.
It is in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that
Peer Gynt
is a poem, not a satire;
The League of Youth
a ‘simple comedy and nothing more’;
Emperor and Galilean
an ‘entirely realistic work’; that in
Ghosts
‘there is not a single opinion, a single utterance which can be laid to the account of the author.... My intention was to produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real.... It preaches nothing at all.’ Of
Hedda Gabler
he says: ‘It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of the social conditions and principles of the present day.’ ‘My chief life-task,’ he defines: ‘to depict human characters and human destinies.’
