Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (720 page)

It is quite possible to write poetic drama in prose, though to use prose rather than verse is to write with the left hand rather than with the right. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and no great dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama. Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or a side-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Molière had used prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself a good craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarily dependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama. Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry; think, I will not say of Molière, but of Congreve. What is more romantic than
The Way of the World
? But Ibsen extracts the romantic quality from drama as if it were a poison; and, in deciding to write realistically in prose, he gives up every aim but that which he defines, so early as 1874, as the wish ‘to produce the impression on the reader that what he was reading was something that had really happened.’ He is not even speaking of the effect in a theatre; he is defining his aim inside the covers of a book, his whole conception of drama.

The art of imitation has never been carried further than it has been carried by Ibsen in his central plays; and with him, at his best, it is no mere imitation but a critical interpretation of life. How greatly this can be done, how greatly Ibsen has done it, there is
Ghosts
to show us. Yet at what point this supreme criticism may stop, what remains beyond it in the treatment of the vilest contemporary material, we shall see if we turn to a play which seems at first sight more grossly realistic than the most realistic play of Ibsen — Tolstoi’s
Powers of Darkness
. Though, as one reads and sees it, the pity and fear seem to weigh almost intolerably upon one, the impression left upon the mind when the reading or the performance is over, is that left by the hearing of noble and tragic music. How, out of such human discords, such a divine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret of Tolstoi’s genius, as it is the secret of the musician’s. Here, achieved in terms of naked horror, we find some of the things which Maeterlinck has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through forms of vague beauty. And we find also another kind of achievement, by the side of which Ibsen’s cunning adjustments of reality seem a little trivial or a little unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us, as in no other modern play, by an awful sincerity and an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoi has learned by instinct some stagecraft which playwrights have been toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has supplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, out of some creative abundance which has taken the dregs of human life up into itself and transfigured them by that pity which is understanding, by that faith which is creation, Tolstoi has in this play done what Ibsen has never done — given us an interpretation of life which owes nothing to science, nothing to the prose conception of life, but which, in spite of its form, is essential poetry.

Ibsen’s concern is with character; and no playwright has created a more probable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and so completely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently so unconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we would about real people, and sometimes take sides with them against their creator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know all their tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, their habits, the things that a novelist spends so much of his time in bringing laboriously before us. Ibsen, in a single stage direction, gives you more than you would find in a chapter of a novel. His characters, when they are most themselves, are modern, of the day or moment; they are average, and represent nothing which we have not met with, nothing which astonishes us because it is of a nobility, a heroism, a wildness beyond our acquaintance. It is for this that he has been most praised; and there is something marvellous in the precision of his measurements of just so much and no more of the soul.

Yet there are no great characters in Ibsen; and do not great characters still exist? Ibsen’s exceptional people never authenticate themselves as being greatly exceptional; their genius is vouched for on a report which they are themselves unable to confirm, as in the inarticulate poet Lövborg, or on their own assertion, as with John Gabriel Borkman, of whom even Dr. Brandes admits, ‘His own words do not convince me, for one, that he has ever possessed true genius.’ When he is most himself, when he has the firmest hold on his material, Ibsen limits himself to that part of the soul which he and science know. By taking the average man as his hero, by having no hero, no villain, only probable levels, by limiting human nature to the bounds within which he can clinically examine it, he shirks, for the most part, the greatest crisis of the soul. Can the greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimate issues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and with Œdipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; it is universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetes cries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that little segment of the world which we call society; its laws are not those of nature, its requirements are not the requirements of God or of man; it is a business association for the capture and division of profits; it is, in short, a fit subject for scientific study, but no longer a part of the material of poetry. The characteristic plays of Ibsen are rightly known as ‘social dramas.’ Their problem, for the main part, is no longer man in the world, but man in society. That is why they have no atmosphere, no background, but are carefully localised.

The rhythm of prose is physiological; the rhythm of poetry is musical. There is in every play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is the physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare speaks to the blood like wine or music; it is with exultation, with intoxication, that we see or read
Antony and Cleopatra
, or even
Richard II
. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. These people who are seen so clearly, moving about in a well-realised world, using probable words and doing necessary things, may owe some of their manner at least to the modern French stage, and to the pamphleteer’s prose world of Dumas
fils
; yet, though they may illustrate problems, they no longer recite them. They are seen, not as the poet sees his people, naked against a great darkness, but clothed and contemporary, from the level of an ironical observer who sits in a corner of the same room. It is the doctor who sits there, watching his patients, and smiling ambiguously as he infers from his knowledge of their bodies what pranks their souls are likely to play.

If Ibsen gets no other kind of beauty, does he not get beauty of emotion? Or can there be beauty in an intensity of emotion which can be at least approached, in the power of thrilling, by an Adelphi melodrama? Is the speech of his people, when it is most nearly a revelation of the obscure forces outside us or within us, more than a stammering of those to whom unconsciousness does not lend distinction but intensifies idiosyncrasy? Drama, in its essence, requires no speech; it can be played by marionettes, or in dumb show, and be enthralling. But, speech once admitted, must not that speech, if it is to collaborate in supreme drama, be filled with imagination, be itself a beautiful thing? To Ibsen beauty has always been of the nature of an ornament, not an end. He would concentrate it into a catchword, repeated until it has lost all emotional significance. For the rest, his speech is the language of the newspaper, recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph. Its whole aim is at economy, as if economy were an end rather than a means.

Has not Ibsen, in the social dramas, tried to make poems without words? There is to be beauty of motive and beauty of emotion; but the words are to be the plainest of all the plain words which we use in talking with one another, and nothing in them is to speak greatly when great occasions arise. Men’s speech in great drama is as much higher than the words they would use in real life as their thoughts are higher than those words. It says the unuttered part of our speech. Ibsen would suppress all this heightening as he has suppressed the soliloquy and the aside. But here what he suppresses is not a convention but a means of interpretation. It is suppressing the essence for the sake of the accident.

Ibsen’s genius for the invention of a situation has never been surpassed. More living characters than the characters of Ibsen have never moved on the stage. His women are at work now in the world, interpreting women to themselves, helping to make the women of the future. He has peopled a new world. But the inhabitants of this new world, before they begin to transgress its laws and so lose their own citizenship there, are so faithfully copied from the people about us that they share their dumbness, that dumbness to which it is the power and privilege of poetry to give speech. Given the character and the situation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is: What would this man be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the most deeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies all the difference between prose and poetry.

1906.

The theme out of which ‘A Doll’s House’ was constructed was not of sudden choice. In his notes for this modern tragedy, Ibsen jotted down, under date of 19 Oct 1878, the following statement:

“A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day which is an exclusively masculine society with laws framed by men and with the judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.”

Those who take ‘A Doll’s House’ as indication that Ibsen was a champion of the woman question are wrong in their conclusions; for he was interested much more in the larger spiritual question of the equality of the sexes. If he stressed the feminine in his plays, to the detriment of the masculine, it was simply because he felt that the weaker side of the argument needed the stronger support, in order to reach an equal balance of fairness and justice. ‘A Doll’s House’ was completed while Ibsen was spending the summer of
1879 in
Amalfi; and it was almost immediately published. It raised a storm of protest everywhere, and for many years was regarded solely as an attack upon marriage. Ibsen was called every preposterous name imaginable. The only way in which the play was allowed to be given in London was in an adapted form made by Henry Arthur Jones and called ‘Breaking a Butterfly’; it was produced at the Princess Theatre, 3 March, 1884.

Nora’s slamming of the door in her husband’s face, as she leaves the house, resounded throughout the world. Debates were held everywhere as to whether Nora was justified in leaving her home, whether it was the true act of a mother and a wife, and whether Nora, in the end, would return to Torvald, her husband

As an acting drama, ‘A Doll’s House’ has held the stage and has been as much a goal for the young actress as ‘Camille.’ Apart from its philosophic preachment, it is a portrait of a most interesting woman, — not as subtle a portrait as Hedda Gabler, or as Rebecca West in ‘Rosmersholm,’ but affording, in deep psychology, as well as in such outward scenes as the Christmas Tree, the Tarantella dance, and the denunciation scene, ample opportunity for histrionic ability. Eleanor Duse, Madame Réjane, Agnes Sorma, Mrs. Fiske, Madame Nazimova and Ethel Barrymore, are among the many who have attempted the role. The play was first seen is America when, during
1883, in
Louisville, Ky., Madame Modjeska acted Nora. It was first played in London, in its regular form, by Janet Achurch and Charles Carrington, at the Novelty Theatre, 7 June 1889.

As early as November 1880, when Ibsen was living in Rome, he was meditating on a new play to follow ‘A Doll’s House.’ When he went to Sorrento, in the summer of 1881, he was hard at work upon it. It was finished by the end of November 1881, and, soon after its publication, Ibsen was deluged with letters from people decrying or commending it.

There were many lines in ‘A Doll’s House’ which might be taken as indication of what the new play would be. Instead of the general query, “Did Nora return to her children”? the stress should have been laid on the problem of what would have happened to Nora’s children had she and Helmer persisted in living the life they were accustomed to — a life of lies and subterfuges. The moral rottenness of Oswald Alving, his degenerate relationship with Regina, the serving maid, who proves to be in the end his half-sister, are the direct product of the moral unsavoriness of Captain Alving, whose past life has been covered through the moral smugness of his wife, acting under the advice of the conventional minister, Pastor Manders. If Dr. Rank, in ‘A Doll’s House,’ was suffering from the sins of his fathers, Oswald Alving is the product of the moral degeneracy of his father and the moral weakness of his mother. Thus, Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ becomes an answer to the question whether Nora had a right to leave her children when she did.

It was not an edifying canvas that Ibsen selected for his play, nor did he mean to have it so. What he sought to do was to show the gradual development of Mrs. Alving to that point where she reacts against the spiritual conventionality of Manders, and refuses any longer to respect or protect the memory of her husband, whose life was to have such an evil effect upon Oswald’s physical and moral character. When, finally, in a revolting scene between Oswald and Regina, suggesting in its degeneracy what must have taken place between Captain Alving and Regina’s mother, we at last get the awakening of Mrs. Alving to the unsound foundation upon which her family life had been resting all these years, Mrs. Alving’s regeneration, we know, has come too late. The canker-worm eats inwardly and undermines the whole physical side of Oswald. The play ends in a most tragic manner, and yet the only way in which the play could end. Oswald’s imbecility, which falls upon him as the moral atmosphere begins to clear, is the just retribution, and technically, as far as Ibsen’s own art is concerned, produces one of the most remarkable instances of heredity taking the place of Greek Fate in its tragical workings.

The stage history of ‘Ghosts,’ since its first performance at Helsingborg, on 22 Aug. 1883, is varied in its continual progress. It was not given in London until 13 March 1891, at J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre, it having been held in check by the censor. “England,” writes William Archer, “enjoys the proud distinction of being the one country in the world where ‘Ghosts’ may not be publicly acted.” It was first produced in New York on 5 Jan. 1894, and by the New York Independent Theatre, in 1899, with Miss Mary Shaw as Mrs. Alving. In 1895-96 Madame Nazimova, with Paul Orleneff, gave a notable production of ‘Ghosts’ in a small room in the lower East side. When Nazimova was a student in Russia she wanted to “play Regina for my graduation piece at the dramatic school at Moscow, but they would not let me. ‘Ghosts’ was at that time prohibited by the censor, because its reflects on the Church.”