Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen years you have stood upon a lie?Bernick.A lie?... You call that——Lona.I call it the lie—the threefold lie. First the lie towards me; then the lie towards Betty; then the lie towards Johan.... Is there not something within you that asks you to get clear of the lie?Bernick.You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic happiness, and my position in society?Lona.What right have you to stand where you are standing?And subsequently (p. 70):Lona.A lie, then, has made you the man you now are?Bernick.Whom did it hurt, then?...Lona.You ask whom it hurt? Look into yourself, and see if it has not hurt you.Bernick then examines himself, and shortly before his confession there takes place a highly edifying dialogue between him and the severe guardian of his conscience (p. 98):Bernick.Yes, yes, yes; it all comes of the lie....Lona.Then, why do you not break with all this lying?... What satisfaction does this show and deception give you?Bernick.... It is my son I am working for.... There will come a time when truth shall spread through the life of our society, and upon it he shall found a happier life than his father’s.Lona.With a lie for its groundwork? Reflect what it is you are giving your son for an inheritance.InAn Enemy of the People, words of truth are ever coming from the mouths of the Stockmann family: ‘There’s so much falseness both at home and at school,’ declaims their daughter, Petra. ‘At home you mustn’t speak, and at school you have to stand there and lie to the children.... We have to teach many and many a thing we don’t believe ourselves.... If only I could afford it I’d start a school myself, and things should be very different there.’ The courageous maiden quarrels with an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity (p. 255): ‘What I am angry with you for is that you have not acted honestly towards my father. You told him it was only the truth and the good of the community you cared about.... You are not the man you pretend to be. And I shall never forgive you—never!’ ‘The whole of our developing social life,’ cries the father Stockmann in his turn (p. 242), ‘is rooted in a lie.’ And later on (p. 287) ‘Yes, I love my native town so well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie.... All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You’ll poison the whole country in time; you’ll bring it to sucha pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.’ Now, all this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this fervent worship of truth is only one of the forms under which there appears in Ibsen’s consciousness the mystico-religious obsession of the sacrament of confession, and also, if he were not careful, conformably with his habit, to destroy any too hasty belief in the sincerity of his phraseology by himself ridiculing it. In Gregers Werle he has created the best caricature of his men of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly the same terms as Lona Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but in his mouth the words are intended to excite laughter: ‘And look at this confiding nature, this great child,’ he says of his friend Hjalmar (p. 41). ‘See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under the same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his home, as he calls it, rests upon a lie.... At length I see an object in life.’ This object consists in operating on Hjalmar’s moral cataract. And he does it, too. ‘You are sunk in a poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,’ Gregers says to him (p. 101). ‘You have an insidious disease within you, and you’ve sunk down to die in the dark.... Don’t be afraid; I will try to help you up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.’ And shortly afterwards he says to the father: ‘But Hjalmar I can rescue from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to ruin.’ The scoffer Relling treats no worse than he deserves the idiot who, in fulfilling his ‘mission in life’ disturbs the peace between Hjalmar and his wife, destroys their comfortable home, and drives Hedwig to her death.Yours is a complicated case ... that troublesome integrity-fever [he says to him—p. 360]....I’m fostering the life-illusion [literally ‘the life-lie’] in him.Gregers.Life-illusion? Is that what you said?Relling.Yes, I said illusion. For illusion, you know, is the stimulating principle.... Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.Now, what is Ibsen’s real opinion? Is a man to strive for truth, or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with Relling? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions, or, rather, he replies to them affirmatively and negatively with equal ardour and equal poetic power.Another ‘moral idea’ of Ibsen, about which his choristers chatter most loudly, is that of ‘true marriage.’ It is certainly not easy to discover what his mystic brain conceives by these mysterious words, but it is nevertheless possible to guess it from the hundred obscure notions in his plays. He does not seem to approve of the idea that the woman should regard marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In nearly all his pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony peculiar to him. InGhosts, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life’s unhappinessto the fact that she married the chamberlain for his money—that she sold herself. ‘The sums which I have spent upon the orphanage year by year make up the amount—I have reckoned it up precisely—the amount which made Lieutenant Alving a good match in his day.... It was the purchase-money. I do not choose that money should pass into Oswald’s hands’ (p. 149). InThe Lady from the Sea, Ellida sings the same song (p. 139): ‘It could bring nothing but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together.... Yes, we are (doing so), or, at least, we suppress the truth. For the truth ... is, that you came out there and bought me.... I was not a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain—sold myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and so absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the bargain when you came and proposed to provide for me all my life.’ In almost the same words Hedda says (Hedda Gabler, p. 86): ‘And then he would go and make such a tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for me. I did not know why I should not accept it.’ She did not know why; but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final suicide, are the consequence of her having allowed herself to be ‘provided for.’ The regard paid to the ‘being provided for’ became also the lifelong misery of another woman in the same piece—Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally as ‘governess in the house of her future husband.’ She subsequently undertook the management of the household. Then she allowed herself to be married, although ‘everything around him is distasteful to me,’ and ‘we do not possess a thought in common.’ Ibsen condemns the man who marries for money not less than the woman who allows herself to be ‘provided for.’ The cause of Bernick’s moral downfall (The Pillars of Society, p. 56), is chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he loved, but another. ‘It was for no new fancy that I broke with you; it was entirely for the sake of the money.’Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle to which every rational and moral man will subscribe. But why should one marry? The most reasonable answer can only be, ‘From inclination.’ But Ibsen will have none of this either. The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a love-match. It leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly affirms it (p. 108): ‘You had only seen me and spoken to me a few times. Then you wanted me, and so....’ And then she feels herself a stranger to him, and wishes to leave him. So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted, marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the happiness of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundlyunhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich, and pays for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel marries a girl because she pleases him, and as a reward she wishes to quit him and her home. What conclusion is to be drawn from all this? That marriage from prudence is bad, and marriage from love no better? That marriage in general is worth nothing, and should be abolished? That would be at least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen arrives. Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case of Nora, it is reciprocal. Something else is still necessary—the man must become the educator of his wife. He must help her intellectually. He must let her participate in all his concerns, make of her a companion possessing equal rights, and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she always remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no ‘true marriage.’ ‘I have no right to claim my husband wholly and solely for myself,’ Ellida confesses (The Lady from the Sea, P. 57). ‘Why, I, too, live in something from which others are shut out.’ In the same piece Wangel blames himself in this way (p. 130): ‘I ought to have been at once a father to her and a guide; I ought to have done my best to develop and enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that.... I preferred her just as she was.’ InThe Pillars of SocietyMrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141): ‘For many years I believed that I had at one time possessed you and lost you again. Now I know that I have never possessed you.’ And Lona Hessel draws the moral from this story (p. 97):And do you never think what she might have been to you—she, whom you chose in my stead?Bernick.I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what I required.Lona.Because you have never shared your life-work with her; because you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you.InRosmersholmRector Kroll has treated his wife in the same way; he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully surprised when she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant who has extinguished her mental light (p. 14). ‘My wife, who all her life long has shared my opinions and concurred in my views both in great things and small, is actually inclined to side with the children on many points. And she blames me for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the children. As if it weren’t necessary to. Well, you see how my house is divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it as possible. It’s best to keep such things quiet.’Upon this point also there may be complete agreement. Most assuredly should marriage be not merely a union of bodies, but also a community of minds; most assuredly shouldthe man help and educate the wife intellectually, although it is to be remarked that thisrôleof teacher and guardian assigned with justice by Ibsen to the man, decisively excludes the full intellectual equality of the two married parties equally claimed by him. But how can one reconcile with these notions about the true relation between the man and his wife Nora’s words to her husband (A Doll’s House, p. 111): ‘I must first try to educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I must set to work alone. And that is why I am going away from you now.... I must be thrown entirely upon myself’? We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have read aright. What, then, is the duty of the husband in ‘true marriage’? Shall he help his wife intellectually? Wangel, Mrs. Bernick, Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it, and repels all assistance.Farà da se!She will educate and form herself. As though this contradiction were not already sufficiently bewildering, Ibsen still further mocks those pitiable souls, who would fain obtain rules of morality from him, when, inThe Wild Duck, he derides, as he is wont, all that he has preached on the subject of ‘true marriage’ in all the rest of his pieces. In that production a delicious dialogue is brought about between the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer Relling (p. 337):Gregers.[I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage.Relling.So you don’t find Ekdal’s marriage good enough as it is?Gregers.No doubt it’s as good a marriage as most others, worse luck. But atruemarriage it has never been.Hjalmar.You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.Relling.All rubbish, my boy! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many ... true marriages have you seen in the course of your life?Gregers.Scarcely a single one.Relling.Nor I, either.And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar’s words (p. 345): ‘Well, then, isn’t it exasperating to think that it’s not I, but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage?... Isn’t the marriage between your father and Mrs. Sœrby founded upon complete confidence, upon entire and unreserved candour on both sides? They hide nothing from each other. Their relation is based, if I may put it so’ (!) ‘on mutual confession and absolution.’ Hence no one has yet seen a ‘true marriage’; and when by chance this miracle does happen it is fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Sœrby—Mr. Werle, who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young girls and sent old friends to prison in his place—Mrs. Sœrby, who confides to her husband that she has had illicit relations with every imaginable sort of man. It is a tame imitation of the scene inRaskolnikowby Dostojewski, where the assassin and the prostitute, after a contrite confession, unite their soiledand broken lives; except that in Ibsen the scene is stripped of its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and vulgar.With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in ‘true marriage,’ their husband suddenly becomes ‘a strange man,’ and, without further ceremony, they abandon their home and their children, some, like Nora, ‘to return to their birthplace,’ where ‘it will be easier for me to get something to do of one sort or another’; others, like Ellida, without giving a thought to what will become of them; others, again, like Mrs. Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover and throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously parodied this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for he assigns the laughablerôleof the tragic runaway to a man. ‘I must out into the snow and tempest,’ declaims Hjalmar (The Wild Duck, p. 166), ‘and seek from house to house a shelter for my old father and myself.’ And he really goes, but naturally only to return home the next day, crestfallen, but stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need be said against the idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave-taking, which has become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen spared us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar.We have not yet done with Ibsen’s drivel on the subject of marriage. He seems to exact that no girl should marry before she is fully matured, and possesses an experience of life and a knowledge of the world and of men (A Dolls House, p. 111):Nora.And I—how have I been prepared to educate the children?... For that task I am not ready.... I must first try to educate myself.... I cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what is in books.Helmer.You don’t understand the society in which you live.Nora.No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it.This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going in quest of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the largest possible number of persons, to make a trial, if possible, of a few men before binding herself definitely. A young girl is thoroughly prepared for marriage when she has attained to a respectable age, managed a few households, perhaps also given birth to sundry children, and in this way proved to herself and others that she understands the duties of a housewife and a mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it is the only reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he is here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and rejected as unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental marriage for a longer or shorter period, the preference for brides endowed with a rich experience in love-affairs and sundry children, all this has already existed. Ibsen may learnall that he needs on this subject from his half-compatriot, Professor Westermarck.[341]But he would be no degenerate if he did not regard as progress the return to conditions of the most primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not mistake the far-away past for the future.Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his dramas. There should be no marriage from interest (Hedda, Mrs. Alving, Bernick, etc.). There should be no marriage from love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage of prudence is not a true marriage. But to marry because each pleases the other is equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida). The man should be the woman’s instructor and educator (Wangel, Bernick). The wife should not allow herself to be instructed and educated by the husband, but acquire the necessary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the wife discovers that her marriage is not a ‘true marriage,’ she leaves the husband, for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her children, for children which she has had by a stranger are naturally strangers also. She must, however, at the same time remain with the husband, and endeavour to transform him from a stranger into her own husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is not intended permanently to unite two beings. When anything in the one is not agreeable to the other, they return the ring and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving, Ellida, Mrs. Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true marriage (Relling). This is Ibsen’s doctrine concerning marriage. It leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It amply suffices for the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian poet’s intellect.Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering contradictions, Ibsen’s mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable. We have seen inThe Lady from the Seathat Ellida wishes to abandon her husband, because her marriage is not a true one, and because her husband has become a stranger to her. Why is he a stranger to her? Because he has married her without mutual close acquaintance. ‘You had only seen me and spoken a few words to me.’ She ought not to have let herself be provided for. ‘Rather the meanest labour, rather the most wretched surroundings, so long as they were the result of free will, of free choice.’ From this one can only reasonably conclude that Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless thewoman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has had full freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these conditions existed in the case of the first claimant for her hand. ‘The first—that might have been a complete and real marriage.’ Now, the same Ellida, a few pages before (78), says that she knew absolutely nothing concerning her lover; she did not even know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is spoken of throughout the piece only as ‘the stranger.’Wangel.What else do you know about him?Ellida.Only that he went to sea very young; and that he had been on long voyages.Wangel.Is there nothing more?Ellida.No; we never spoke of such things.Wangel.Of what did you speak, then?Ellida.About the sea!And she betrothed herself to himBecause he said I must.Wangel.You must? Had you no will of your own, then?Ellida.Not when he was near.So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason that, previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly know him, and she must go to ‘the stranger,’ of whom she knows nothing. Her marriage with Wangel is no marriage, because she did not enter into it with perfect freedom of will, but the marriage with ‘the stranger’ will be ‘perfect and pure,’ although when she betrothed herself to him she had ‘no will of her own.’ After this example of his mental maze, it is truly humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning the intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet of the future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself the labour of referring to his other absurdities.In this sameLady from the Sea, Ellida renounces her project of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the ‘stranger,’ as soon as Wangel says ‘with aching heart’: ‘Now you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.’ She remains with Wangel. She chooses him. ‘Whence came the change?’ asks Wangel and the reader with him. ‘Ah, don’t you understand,’ Ellida gushingly replies, ‘that the change came—was bound to come—when I could choose in freedom!’ (p. 141). This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete contrast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives her her freedom; but she was still freer on the first occasion, because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not need to begin by setting her free. As little was external coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently aftermarriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She has come into no property since her marriage, so far as we know from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to explain the change? There is none. It exists in the confused thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself definitively; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy—experimental marriage.We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. InGhostsOswald Alving’s disease is represented as a chastisement for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love. Now, Oswald’s state is the consequence of a complaint which may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know better than that. They know hundreds—nay, thousands—of cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen’s drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be a monster of immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an insane son; and his son could be insane without more culpability on the part of the father than is the case with all men who have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother theintermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of Oswald a panegyric on concubinage—one of the most incredible things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ‘What are they to do?’ replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ‘A poor young artist—a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to get married.’ I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ‘free union,’ and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen’s infantine fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum, very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow to the girl he has persuaded to live with him; and religious marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of the civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something agreeable without undertaking any serious duties; or, finally, in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least, excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love, and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their intention to be faithful to each other unto death.But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying, and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ‘living out one’s life.’ But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of her husband? That all should remain chaste and pure, an idea worked out by Bjornson in hisGlove? No. She is led by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and the law are bad. ‘Oh, that perpetual law and order!’ she exclaims (p. 154); ‘I often think it is that which does all the mischief here in the world.... I can endure all this constraintand cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work my way out to freedom.’ What in the world has Alving’s story to do with ‘law and order?’ and how does ‘freedom’ enter into thisCredo? What connection with the piece have the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into applause. In Tahiti neither ‘order’ nor ‘morals’ reign in the sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties have all the ‘freedom’ to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ‘work her way out,’ and the men so ‘live out their lives’ that ships’ officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. And in that very region Chamberlain Alving’s disease is so widespread that, according to Ibsen’s medical theory, all the young Tahitians must be Oswalds.But this is a constant habit of Ibsen’s, evidenced in all his pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ‘I don’t know what religion is,’ Nora says in the well-known scene where she leaves her husband (p. 114). ‘... I know nothing but what our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true.... I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I thought they were; but I can’t convince myself that they are right.’ Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her father’s name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39): ‘The laws inquire little into motives.’ The whole of this scene, in view of which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play, and does not originally spring from it. If Nora wishes to abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. InThe Pillars of SocietyBernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces his avowal with the words (p. 110): ‘Let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, itshollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum,’ etc. ‘Speak for yourself, Bernick, speak for yourself,’ one might well call out to the old wind-bag, who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual case. ‘I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made within the last few days,’ exclaims Stockmann inAn Enemy of the People, ‘the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ That may in itself be true; but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato’s republic it might happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general proposition that ‘our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ InRosmersholm, Brendel says in an obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with foreboding (p. 23): ‘We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.’ This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow in the eye in the place where it occurs, forRosmersholmhas no connection with any definite period of time; and it is not necessary to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas—to any age or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who wish to pick a quarrel: ‘Sir, why did you look at me in that way?’ ‘Pardon me, I did not look at you.’ ‘What! you say, then, that I lie?’ ‘I said nothing of the sort.’ ‘You give me the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.’ This is Ibsen’s method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead, however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naïve farces of our fathers. Cleanse Ibsen’s dramas of these pasted-on phrases, and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as ‘modern’ productions; there will remain only a tissue of absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures, not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis—i.e., some anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world withoutseeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself. In contradiction to the saying of the poet, ‘All that is human is alien to him,’ and his own ‘I’ alone occupies him and absorbs his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem wherein he says, ‘Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day over one’s own self.’[342]The ‘ghost in the heart and brain’ is the obsessions and impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is nothing but a ‘judgment day’ of the poet over himself, cannot be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with distinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the chief events and central characters are always astonishingly absurd and alien to all the realities of the world.It is inBrandthat Ibsen’s absurdity apparently achieves its greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiteratedad nauseamthat this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard’s crazy ‘Either-Or.’ Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ‘all or nothing,’ and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. What he especially understands by these high-sounding words the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, however, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness, and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the following wonderful information (p. 151): ‘How long will the struggle last?’ (viz., the climbing, for there is no other struggle in this Act). ‘It lasts until life’s end. Until you have sacrificed all; until you are freed from your compact; until that which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.’ (Whatthis is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ‘Until every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from the All or Nothing. And your sacrifices? All the gods which with you take the place of the eternal God; the shining golden chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid slothfulness. The reward of victory? Unity of will, activity of faith, pureness of soul.’ Naturally on listening to this ranting the good people ‘come to their senses and go home,’ but the lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want to pant uphill in order to ‘wish for something unswervingly,’ to attain to ‘all or nothing,’ and to arrive at ‘unity of will.’ For it is ‘the all’ which seems to inhabit mountains; not merely freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (‘Liberty dwells in the mountains,’ Schiller has said.)And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling impulse,[343]who with furious passion are continually and reiteratingly talking of ‘the goal’ which they wish to attain, but who neither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is, nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his inflexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.Ibsen’s absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an idea than the ‘tra-la-la’ sung to a song of which one has forgotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest of function[344]in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are continuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of profundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recognisesthem as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import. Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in consternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of their table companions at the habitual café. I will give some illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated between intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis of the centres of ideation.InThe Lady from the Sea(p. 25) Lyngstrand says: ‘I am to a certain extent a little infirm.’[345]This ‘to a certain extent’ is admirable! Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic projects (p. 51):As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great work—a group,as they call it.Arnholm.Is there anything else?Lyngstrand.Yes, there is to be another figure—a sort of apparition, as they say.As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that he intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the sculptor’s mouth. But inHedda Gabler, Brack, a sharp and cleverbon vivant, says (p. 87): ‘But as far as regards myself, you know very well that I have always entertained a—a certain respect for the marriage tie,generally speaking, Mrs. Hedda.’ InRosmersholmBrendel says (p. 24): ‘So you see when golden dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I fashioned them into poems, into visions, into pictures—in the rough, as it were, you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I have enjoyed in my time! The mysterious bliss of creation—in the rough, as I said.’ Rector Kroll says (p. 18): ‘A family that now soon for some centuries has held its place as the first in the land.’[346]‘Now soon for some centuries’! That means that it is not yet ‘some centuries,’ but ‘soon’ will be ‘some centuries.’ Hence ‘soon’ must include in itself ‘some centuries.’ By what miracle? InThe Wild Duckwe have the intentionally, but, in their exaggeration impossibly, idiotic conversations of the ‘fat,’ ‘bald,’ and ‘short-sighted’ gentlemen in the first act, but also this remark by Gina, who is in no way depicted as an idiot (p. 270):Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father when he comes home in the evening?Hedwig.Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time.Gina.Yes,there is something [true][347]in that!!In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal, Gregers and Hjalmar we read (p. 289):Ekdal.He was out in a boat,you see, and he shot her. But father’s sight is pretty bad now. H’m; he only wounded her.Gregers.Ah! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose.Hjalmar.Yes,two or three....Gregers.And she thrives all right in the garret there?Hjalmar.Yes, wonderfully well. She’s got fat. She’s been in there so long now that she’s forgotten her natural wild life, and it all depends on that.Gregers.You’re right there, Hjalmar.And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle (p. 305):Hedwig.... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new basket for the wild duck.Gregers.So you could; and it was, strictly speaking, your business, wasn’t it?Hedwig.Yes, for she’smywild duck.Gregers.Of course she is!Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively profound, but in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness.InA Doll’s House(p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion: ‘Well, after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and get them safe in;’ to which Rank significantly replies: ‘Yes, so people say. And it is that very consideration which turns society into a hospital.’ What does this meditative and oracular speech mean? Is it Rank’s opinion that society is a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it would be healthy if its sick were not cared for? Would the untended sick be any less sick? If he believes that he believes an idiocy. Or are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in this manner got rid of? If he preaches that, he preaches a barbarism and a crime, and that is not in accordance with Rank’s character as Ibsen depicts him. We may turn and twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always find either stupidity or want of meaning.InRosmersholm, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ‘devote all his life and all his energies to this one thing—the creation of a true democracy in this country.’ And, wonderful to relate, the persons to whom Rosmer says these words all seem to comprehend what the ‘true democracy’ is. Without being asked, Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of his Pythian utterance: ‘I want to awaken the democracy to its true task—that of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by setting free their minds and purifying their wills.... I will only try to arouse them to their task. They themselves must accomplish it ... by their own strength. There is no other.... Peace and joy and mutual forbearance must once more enterinto their souls.’ Rebecca repeats to him his programme (p. 62):
Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen years you have stood upon a lie?Bernick.A lie?... You call that——Lona.I call it the lie—the threefold lie. First the lie towards me; then the lie towards Betty; then the lie towards Johan.... Is there not something within you that asks you to get clear of the lie?Bernick.You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic happiness, and my position in society?Lona.What right have you to stand where you are standing?And subsequently (p. 70):Lona.A lie, then, has made you the man you now are?Bernick.Whom did it hurt, then?...Lona.You ask whom it hurt? Look into yourself, and see if it has not hurt you.Bernick then examines himself, and shortly before his confession there takes place a highly edifying dialogue between him and the severe guardian of his conscience (p. 98):Bernick.Yes, yes, yes; it all comes of the lie....Lona.Then, why do you not break with all this lying?... What satisfaction does this show and deception give you?Bernick.... It is my son I am working for.... There will come a time when truth shall spread through the life of our society, and upon it he shall found a happier life than his father’s.Lona.With a lie for its groundwork? Reflect what it is you are giving your son for an inheritance.InAn Enemy of the People, words of truth are ever coming from the mouths of the Stockmann family: ‘There’s so much falseness both at home and at school,’ declaims their daughter, Petra. ‘At home you mustn’t speak, and at school you have to stand there and lie to the children.... We have to teach many and many a thing we don’t believe ourselves.... If only I could afford it I’d start a school myself, and things should be very different there.’ The courageous maiden quarrels with an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity (p. 255): ‘What I am angry with you for is that you have not acted honestly towards my father. You told him it was only the truth and the good of the community you cared about.... You are not the man you pretend to be. And I shall never forgive you—never!’ ‘The whole of our developing social life,’ cries the father Stockmann in his turn (p. 242), ‘is rooted in a lie.’ And later on (p. 287) ‘Yes, I love my native town so well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie.... All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You’ll poison the whole country in time; you’ll bring it to sucha pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.’ Now, all this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this fervent worship of truth is only one of the forms under which there appears in Ibsen’s consciousness the mystico-religious obsession of the sacrament of confession, and also, if he were not careful, conformably with his habit, to destroy any too hasty belief in the sincerity of his phraseology by himself ridiculing it. In Gregers Werle he has created the best caricature of his men of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly the same terms as Lona Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but in his mouth the words are intended to excite laughter: ‘And look at this confiding nature, this great child,’ he says of his friend Hjalmar (p. 41). ‘See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under the same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his home, as he calls it, rests upon a lie.... At length I see an object in life.’ This object consists in operating on Hjalmar’s moral cataract. And he does it, too. ‘You are sunk in a poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,’ Gregers says to him (p. 101). ‘You have an insidious disease within you, and you’ve sunk down to die in the dark.... Don’t be afraid; I will try to help you up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.’ And shortly afterwards he says to the father: ‘But Hjalmar I can rescue from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to ruin.’ The scoffer Relling treats no worse than he deserves the idiot who, in fulfilling his ‘mission in life’ disturbs the peace between Hjalmar and his wife, destroys their comfortable home, and drives Hedwig to her death.Yours is a complicated case ... that troublesome integrity-fever [he says to him—p. 360]....I’m fostering the life-illusion [literally ‘the life-lie’] in him.Gregers.Life-illusion? Is that what you said?Relling.Yes, I said illusion. For illusion, you know, is the stimulating principle.... Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.Now, what is Ibsen’s real opinion? Is a man to strive for truth, or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with Relling? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions, or, rather, he replies to them affirmatively and negatively with equal ardour and equal poetic power.Another ‘moral idea’ of Ibsen, about which his choristers chatter most loudly, is that of ‘true marriage.’ It is certainly not easy to discover what his mystic brain conceives by these mysterious words, but it is nevertheless possible to guess it from the hundred obscure notions in his plays. He does not seem to approve of the idea that the woman should regard marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In nearly all his pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony peculiar to him. InGhosts, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life’s unhappinessto the fact that she married the chamberlain for his money—that she sold herself. ‘The sums which I have spent upon the orphanage year by year make up the amount—I have reckoned it up precisely—the amount which made Lieutenant Alving a good match in his day.... It was the purchase-money. I do not choose that money should pass into Oswald’s hands’ (p. 149). InThe Lady from the Sea, Ellida sings the same song (p. 139): ‘It could bring nothing but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together.... Yes, we are (doing so), or, at least, we suppress the truth. For the truth ... is, that you came out there and bought me.... I was not a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain—sold myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and so absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the bargain when you came and proposed to provide for me all my life.’ In almost the same words Hedda says (Hedda Gabler, p. 86): ‘And then he would go and make such a tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for me. I did not know why I should not accept it.’ She did not know why; but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final suicide, are the consequence of her having allowed herself to be ‘provided for.’ The regard paid to the ‘being provided for’ became also the lifelong misery of another woman in the same piece—Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally as ‘governess in the house of her future husband.’ She subsequently undertook the management of the household. Then she allowed herself to be married, although ‘everything around him is distasteful to me,’ and ‘we do not possess a thought in common.’ Ibsen condemns the man who marries for money not less than the woman who allows herself to be ‘provided for.’ The cause of Bernick’s moral downfall (The Pillars of Society, p. 56), is chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he loved, but another. ‘It was for no new fancy that I broke with you; it was entirely for the sake of the money.’Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle to which every rational and moral man will subscribe. But why should one marry? The most reasonable answer can only be, ‘From inclination.’ But Ibsen will have none of this either. The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a love-match. It leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly affirms it (p. 108): ‘You had only seen me and spoken to me a few times. Then you wanted me, and so....’ And then she feels herself a stranger to him, and wishes to leave him. So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted, marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the happiness of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundlyunhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich, and pays for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel marries a girl because she pleases him, and as a reward she wishes to quit him and her home. What conclusion is to be drawn from all this? That marriage from prudence is bad, and marriage from love no better? That marriage in general is worth nothing, and should be abolished? That would be at least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen arrives. Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case of Nora, it is reciprocal. Something else is still necessary—the man must become the educator of his wife. He must help her intellectually. He must let her participate in all his concerns, make of her a companion possessing equal rights, and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she always remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no ‘true marriage.’ ‘I have no right to claim my husband wholly and solely for myself,’ Ellida confesses (The Lady from the Sea, P. 57). ‘Why, I, too, live in something from which others are shut out.’ In the same piece Wangel blames himself in this way (p. 130): ‘I ought to have been at once a father to her and a guide; I ought to have done my best to develop and enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that.... I preferred her just as she was.’ InThe Pillars of SocietyMrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141): ‘For many years I believed that I had at one time possessed you and lost you again. Now I know that I have never possessed you.’ And Lona Hessel draws the moral from this story (p. 97):And do you never think what she might have been to you—she, whom you chose in my stead?Bernick.I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what I required.Lona.Because you have never shared your life-work with her; because you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you.InRosmersholmRector Kroll has treated his wife in the same way; he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully surprised when she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant who has extinguished her mental light (p. 14). ‘My wife, who all her life long has shared my opinions and concurred in my views both in great things and small, is actually inclined to side with the children on many points. And she blames me for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the children. As if it weren’t necessary to. Well, you see how my house is divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it as possible. It’s best to keep such things quiet.’Upon this point also there may be complete agreement. Most assuredly should marriage be not merely a union of bodies, but also a community of minds; most assuredly shouldthe man help and educate the wife intellectually, although it is to be remarked that thisrôleof teacher and guardian assigned with justice by Ibsen to the man, decisively excludes the full intellectual equality of the two married parties equally claimed by him. But how can one reconcile with these notions about the true relation between the man and his wife Nora’s words to her husband (A Doll’s House, p. 111): ‘I must first try to educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I must set to work alone. And that is why I am going away from you now.... I must be thrown entirely upon myself’? We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have read aright. What, then, is the duty of the husband in ‘true marriage’? Shall he help his wife intellectually? Wangel, Mrs. Bernick, Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it, and repels all assistance.Farà da se!She will educate and form herself. As though this contradiction were not already sufficiently bewildering, Ibsen still further mocks those pitiable souls, who would fain obtain rules of morality from him, when, inThe Wild Duck, he derides, as he is wont, all that he has preached on the subject of ‘true marriage’ in all the rest of his pieces. In that production a delicious dialogue is brought about between the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer Relling (p. 337):Gregers.[I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage.Relling.So you don’t find Ekdal’s marriage good enough as it is?Gregers.No doubt it’s as good a marriage as most others, worse luck. But atruemarriage it has never been.Hjalmar.You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.Relling.All rubbish, my boy! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many ... true marriages have you seen in the course of your life?Gregers.Scarcely a single one.Relling.Nor I, either.And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar’s words (p. 345): ‘Well, then, isn’t it exasperating to think that it’s not I, but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage?... Isn’t the marriage between your father and Mrs. Sœrby founded upon complete confidence, upon entire and unreserved candour on both sides? They hide nothing from each other. Their relation is based, if I may put it so’ (!) ‘on mutual confession and absolution.’ Hence no one has yet seen a ‘true marriage’; and when by chance this miracle does happen it is fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Sœrby—Mr. Werle, who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young girls and sent old friends to prison in his place—Mrs. Sœrby, who confides to her husband that she has had illicit relations with every imaginable sort of man. It is a tame imitation of the scene inRaskolnikowby Dostojewski, where the assassin and the prostitute, after a contrite confession, unite their soiledand broken lives; except that in Ibsen the scene is stripped of its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and vulgar.With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in ‘true marriage,’ their husband suddenly becomes ‘a strange man,’ and, without further ceremony, they abandon their home and their children, some, like Nora, ‘to return to their birthplace,’ where ‘it will be easier for me to get something to do of one sort or another’; others, like Ellida, without giving a thought to what will become of them; others, again, like Mrs. Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover and throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously parodied this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for he assigns the laughablerôleof the tragic runaway to a man. ‘I must out into the snow and tempest,’ declaims Hjalmar (The Wild Duck, p. 166), ‘and seek from house to house a shelter for my old father and myself.’ And he really goes, but naturally only to return home the next day, crestfallen, but stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need be said against the idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave-taking, which has become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen spared us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar.We have not yet done with Ibsen’s drivel on the subject of marriage. He seems to exact that no girl should marry before she is fully matured, and possesses an experience of life and a knowledge of the world and of men (A Dolls House, p. 111):Nora.And I—how have I been prepared to educate the children?... For that task I am not ready.... I must first try to educate myself.... I cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what is in books.Helmer.You don’t understand the society in which you live.Nora.No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it.This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going in quest of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the largest possible number of persons, to make a trial, if possible, of a few men before binding herself definitely. A young girl is thoroughly prepared for marriage when she has attained to a respectable age, managed a few households, perhaps also given birth to sundry children, and in this way proved to herself and others that she understands the duties of a housewife and a mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it is the only reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he is here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and rejected as unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental marriage for a longer or shorter period, the preference for brides endowed with a rich experience in love-affairs and sundry children, all this has already existed. Ibsen may learnall that he needs on this subject from his half-compatriot, Professor Westermarck.[341]But he would be no degenerate if he did not regard as progress the return to conditions of the most primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not mistake the far-away past for the future.Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his dramas. There should be no marriage from interest (Hedda, Mrs. Alving, Bernick, etc.). There should be no marriage from love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage of prudence is not a true marriage. But to marry because each pleases the other is equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida). The man should be the woman’s instructor and educator (Wangel, Bernick). The wife should not allow herself to be instructed and educated by the husband, but acquire the necessary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the wife discovers that her marriage is not a ‘true marriage,’ she leaves the husband, for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her children, for children which she has had by a stranger are naturally strangers also. She must, however, at the same time remain with the husband, and endeavour to transform him from a stranger into her own husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is not intended permanently to unite two beings. When anything in the one is not agreeable to the other, they return the ring and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving, Ellida, Mrs. Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true marriage (Relling). This is Ibsen’s doctrine concerning marriage. It leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It amply suffices for the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian poet’s intellect.Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering contradictions, Ibsen’s mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable. We have seen inThe Lady from the Seathat Ellida wishes to abandon her husband, because her marriage is not a true one, and because her husband has become a stranger to her. Why is he a stranger to her? Because he has married her without mutual close acquaintance. ‘You had only seen me and spoken a few words to me.’ She ought not to have let herself be provided for. ‘Rather the meanest labour, rather the most wretched surroundings, so long as they were the result of free will, of free choice.’ From this one can only reasonably conclude that Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless thewoman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has had full freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these conditions existed in the case of the first claimant for her hand. ‘The first—that might have been a complete and real marriage.’ Now, the same Ellida, a few pages before (78), says that she knew absolutely nothing concerning her lover; she did not even know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is spoken of throughout the piece only as ‘the stranger.’Wangel.What else do you know about him?Ellida.Only that he went to sea very young; and that he had been on long voyages.Wangel.Is there nothing more?Ellida.No; we never spoke of such things.Wangel.Of what did you speak, then?Ellida.About the sea!And she betrothed herself to himBecause he said I must.Wangel.You must? Had you no will of your own, then?Ellida.Not when he was near.So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason that, previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly know him, and she must go to ‘the stranger,’ of whom she knows nothing. Her marriage with Wangel is no marriage, because she did not enter into it with perfect freedom of will, but the marriage with ‘the stranger’ will be ‘perfect and pure,’ although when she betrothed herself to him she had ‘no will of her own.’ After this example of his mental maze, it is truly humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning the intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet of the future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself the labour of referring to his other absurdities.In this sameLady from the Sea, Ellida renounces her project of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the ‘stranger,’ as soon as Wangel says ‘with aching heart’: ‘Now you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.’ She remains with Wangel. She chooses him. ‘Whence came the change?’ asks Wangel and the reader with him. ‘Ah, don’t you understand,’ Ellida gushingly replies, ‘that the change came—was bound to come—when I could choose in freedom!’ (p. 141). This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete contrast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives her her freedom; but she was still freer on the first occasion, because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not need to begin by setting her free. As little was external coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently aftermarriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She has come into no property since her marriage, so far as we know from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to explain the change? There is none. It exists in the confused thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself definitively; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy—experimental marriage.We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. InGhostsOswald Alving’s disease is represented as a chastisement for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love. Now, Oswald’s state is the consequence of a complaint which may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know better than that. They know hundreds—nay, thousands—of cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen’s drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be a monster of immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an insane son; and his son could be insane without more culpability on the part of the father than is the case with all men who have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother theintermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of Oswald a panegyric on concubinage—one of the most incredible things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ‘What are they to do?’ replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ‘A poor young artist—a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to get married.’ I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ‘free union,’ and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen’s infantine fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum, very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow to the girl he has persuaded to live with him; and religious marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of the civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something agreeable without undertaking any serious duties; or, finally, in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least, excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love, and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their intention to be faithful to each other unto death.But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying, and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ‘living out one’s life.’ But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of her husband? That all should remain chaste and pure, an idea worked out by Bjornson in hisGlove? No. She is led by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and the law are bad. ‘Oh, that perpetual law and order!’ she exclaims (p. 154); ‘I often think it is that which does all the mischief here in the world.... I can endure all this constraintand cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work my way out to freedom.’ What in the world has Alving’s story to do with ‘law and order?’ and how does ‘freedom’ enter into thisCredo? What connection with the piece have the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into applause. In Tahiti neither ‘order’ nor ‘morals’ reign in the sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties have all the ‘freedom’ to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ‘work her way out,’ and the men so ‘live out their lives’ that ships’ officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. And in that very region Chamberlain Alving’s disease is so widespread that, according to Ibsen’s medical theory, all the young Tahitians must be Oswalds.But this is a constant habit of Ibsen’s, evidenced in all his pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ‘I don’t know what religion is,’ Nora says in the well-known scene where she leaves her husband (p. 114). ‘... I know nothing but what our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true.... I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I thought they were; but I can’t convince myself that they are right.’ Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her father’s name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39): ‘The laws inquire little into motives.’ The whole of this scene, in view of which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play, and does not originally spring from it. If Nora wishes to abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. InThe Pillars of SocietyBernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces his avowal with the words (p. 110): ‘Let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, itshollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum,’ etc. ‘Speak for yourself, Bernick, speak for yourself,’ one might well call out to the old wind-bag, who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual case. ‘I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made within the last few days,’ exclaims Stockmann inAn Enemy of the People, ‘the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ That may in itself be true; but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato’s republic it might happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general proposition that ‘our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ InRosmersholm, Brendel says in an obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with foreboding (p. 23): ‘We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.’ This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow in the eye in the place where it occurs, forRosmersholmhas no connection with any definite period of time; and it is not necessary to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas—to any age or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who wish to pick a quarrel: ‘Sir, why did you look at me in that way?’ ‘Pardon me, I did not look at you.’ ‘What! you say, then, that I lie?’ ‘I said nothing of the sort.’ ‘You give me the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.’ This is Ibsen’s method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead, however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naïve farces of our fathers. Cleanse Ibsen’s dramas of these pasted-on phrases, and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as ‘modern’ productions; there will remain only a tissue of absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures, not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis—i.e., some anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world withoutseeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself. In contradiction to the saying of the poet, ‘All that is human is alien to him,’ and his own ‘I’ alone occupies him and absorbs his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem wherein he says, ‘Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day over one’s own self.’[342]The ‘ghost in the heart and brain’ is the obsessions and impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is nothing but a ‘judgment day’ of the poet over himself, cannot be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with distinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the chief events and central characters are always astonishingly absurd and alien to all the realities of the world.It is inBrandthat Ibsen’s absurdity apparently achieves its greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiteratedad nauseamthat this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard’s crazy ‘Either-Or.’ Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ‘all or nothing,’ and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. What he especially understands by these high-sounding words the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, however, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness, and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the following wonderful information (p. 151): ‘How long will the struggle last?’ (viz., the climbing, for there is no other struggle in this Act). ‘It lasts until life’s end. Until you have sacrificed all; until you are freed from your compact; until that which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.’ (Whatthis is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ‘Until every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from the All or Nothing. And your sacrifices? All the gods which with you take the place of the eternal God; the shining golden chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid slothfulness. The reward of victory? Unity of will, activity of faith, pureness of soul.’ Naturally on listening to this ranting the good people ‘come to their senses and go home,’ but the lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want to pant uphill in order to ‘wish for something unswervingly,’ to attain to ‘all or nothing,’ and to arrive at ‘unity of will.’ For it is ‘the all’ which seems to inhabit mountains; not merely freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (‘Liberty dwells in the mountains,’ Schiller has said.)And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling impulse,[343]who with furious passion are continually and reiteratingly talking of ‘the goal’ which they wish to attain, but who neither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is, nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his inflexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.Ibsen’s absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an idea than the ‘tra-la-la’ sung to a song of which one has forgotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest of function[344]in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are continuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of profundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recognisesthem as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import. Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in consternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of their table companions at the habitual café. I will give some illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated between intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis of the centres of ideation.InThe Lady from the Sea(p. 25) Lyngstrand says: ‘I am to a certain extent a little infirm.’[345]This ‘to a certain extent’ is admirable! Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic projects (p. 51):As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great work—a group,as they call it.Arnholm.Is there anything else?Lyngstrand.Yes, there is to be another figure—a sort of apparition, as they say.As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that he intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the sculptor’s mouth. But inHedda Gabler, Brack, a sharp and cleverbon vivant, says (p. 87): ‘But as far as regards myself, you know very well that I have always entertained a—a certain respect for the marriage tie,generally speaking, Mrs. Hedda.’ InRosmersholmBrendel says (p. 24): ‘So you see when golden dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I fashioned them into poems, into visions, into pictures—in the rough, as it were, you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I have enjoyed in my time! The mysterious bliss of creation—in the rough, as I said.’ Rector Kroll says (p. 18): ‘A family that now soon for some centuries has held its place as the first in the land.’[346]‘Now soon for some centuries’! That means that it is not yet ‘some centuries,’ but ‘soon’ will be ‘some centuries.’ Hence ‘soon’ must include in itself ‘some centuries.’ By what miracle? InThe Wild Duckwe have the intentionally, but, in their exaggeration impossibly, idiotic conversations of the ‘fat,’ ‘bald,’ and ‘short-sighted’ gentlemen in the first act, but also this remark by Gina, who is in no way depicted as an idiot (p. 270):Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father when he comes home in the evening?Hedwig.Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time.Gina.Yes,there is something [true][347]in that!!In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal, Gregers and Hjalmar we read (p. 289):Ekdal.He was out in a boat,you see, and he shot her. But father’s sight is pretty bad now. H’m; he only wounded her.Gregers.Ah! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose.Hjalmar.Yes,two or three....Gregers.And she thrives all right in the garret there?Hjalmar.Yes, wonderfully well. She’s got fat. She’s been in there so long now that she’s forgotten her natural wild life, and it all depends on that.Gregers.You’re right there, Hjalmar.And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle (p. 305):Hedwig.... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new basket for the wild duck.Gregers.So you could; and it was, strictly speaking, your business, wasn’t it?Hedwig.Yes, for she’smywild duck.Gregers.Of course she is!Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively profound, but in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness.InA Doll’s House(p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion: ‘Well, after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and get them safe in;’ to which Rank significantly replies: ‘Yes, so people say. And it is that very consideration which turns society into a hospital.’ What does this meditative and oracular speech mean? Is it Rank’s opinion that society is a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it would be healthy if its sick were not cared for? Would the untended sick be any less sick? If he believes that he believes an idiocy. Or are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in this manner got rid of? If he preaches that, he preaches a barbarism and a crime, and that is not in accordance with Rank’s character as Ibsen depicts him. We may turn and twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always find either stupidity or want of meaning.InRosmersholm, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ‘devote all his life and all his energies to this one thing—the creation of a true democracy in this country.’ And, wonderful to relate, the persons to whom Rosmer says these words all seem to comprehend what the ‘true democracy’ is. Without being asked, Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of his Pythian utterance: ‘I want to awaken the democracy to its true task—that of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by setting free their minds and purifying their wills.... I will only try to arouse them to their task. They themselves must accomplish it ... by their own strength. There is no other.... Peace and joy and mutual forbearance must once more enterinto their souls.’ Rebecca repeats to him his programme (p. 62):
Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen years you have stood upon a lie?Bernick.A lie?... You call that——Lona.I call it the lie—the threefold lie. First the lie towards me; then the lie towards Betty; then the lie towards Johan.... Is there not something within you that asks you to get clear of the lie?Bernick.You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic happiness, and my position in society?Lona.What right have you to stand where you are standing?
Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen years you have stood upon a lie?
Bernick.A lie?... You call that——
Lona.I call it the lie—the threefold lie. First the lie towards me; then the lie towards Betty; then the lie towards Johan.... Is there not something within you that asks you to get clear of the lie?
Bernick.You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic happiness, and my position in society?
Lona.What right have you to stand where you are standing?
And subsequently (p. 70):
Lona.A lie, then, has made you the man you now are?Bernick.Whom did it hurt, then?...Lona.You ask whom it hurt? Look into yourself, and see if it has not hurt you.
Lona.A lie, then, has made you the man you now are?
Bernick.Whom did it hurt, then?...
Lona.You ask whom it hurt? Look into yourself, and see if it has not hurt you.
Bernick then examines himself, and shortly before his confession there takes place a highly edifying dialogue between him and the severe guardian of his conscience (p. 98):
Bernick.Yes, yes, yes; it all comes of the lie....Lona.Then, why do you not break with all this lying?... What satisfaction does this show and deception give you?Bernick.... It is my son I am working for.... There will come a time when truth shall spread through the life of our society, and upon it he shall found a happier life than his father’s.Lona.With a lie for its groundwork? Reflect what it is you are giving your son for an inheritance.
Bernick.Yes, yes, yes; it all comes of the lie....
Lona.Then, why do you not break with all this lying?... What satisfaction does this show and deception give you?
Bernick.... It is my son I am working for.... There will come a time when truth shall spread through the life of our society, and upon it he shall found a happier life than his father’s.
Lona.With a lie for its groundwork? Reflect what it is you are giving your son for an inheritance.
InAn Enemy of the People, words of truth are ever coming from the mouths of the Stockmann family: ‘There’s so much falseness both at home and at school,’ declaims their daughter, Petra. ‘At home you mustn’t speak, and at school you have to stand there and lie to the children.... We have to teach many and many a thing we don’t believe ourselves.... If only I could afford it I’d start a school myself, and things should be very different there.’ The courageous maiden quarrels with an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity (p. 255): ‘What I am angry with you for is that you have not acted honestly towards my father. You told him it was only the truth and the good of the community you cared about.... You are not the man you pretend to be. And I shall never forgive you—never!’ ‘The whole of our developing social life,’ cries the father Stockmann in his turn (p. 242), ‘is rooted in a lie.’ And later on (p. 287) ‘Yes, I love my native town so well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie.... All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You’ll poison the whole country in time; you’ll bring it to sucha pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.’ Now, all this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this fervent worship of truth is only one of the forms under which there appears in Ibsen’s consciousness the mystico-religious obsession of the sacrament of confession, and also, if he were not careful, conformably with his habit, to destroy any too hasty belief in the sincerity of his phraseology by himself ridiculing it. In Gregers Werle he has created the best caricature of his men of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly the same terms as Lona Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but in his mouth the words are intended to excite laughter: ‘And look at this confiding nature, this great child,’ he says of his friend Hjalmar (p. 41). ‘See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under the same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his home, as he calls it, rests upon a lie.... At length I see an object in life.’ This object consists in operating on Hjalmar’s moral cataract. And he does it, too. ‘You are sunk in a poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,’ Gregers says to him (p. 101). ‘You have an insidious disease within you, and you’ve sunk down to die in the dark.... Don’t be afraid; I will try to help you up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.’ And shortly afterwards he says to the father: ‘But Hjalmar I can rescue from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to ruin.’ The scoffer Relling treats no worse than he deserves the idiot who, in fulfilling his ‘mission in life’ disturbs the peace between Hjalmar and his wife, destroys their comfortable home, and drives Hedwig to her death.
Yours is a complicated case ... that troublesome integrity-fever [he says to him—p. 360]....I’m fostering the life-illusion [literally ‘the life-lie’] in him.Gregers.Life-illusion? Is that what you said?Relling.Yes, I said illusion. For illusion, you know, is the stimulating principle.... Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.
Yours is a complicated case ... that troublesome integrity-fever [he says to him—p. 360]....
I’m fostering the life-illusion [literally ‘the life-lie’] in him.
Gregers.Life-illusion? Is that what you said?
Relling.Yes, I said illusion. For illusion, you know, is the stimulating principle.... Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.
Now, what is Ibsen’s real opinion? Is a man to strive for truth, or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with Relling? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions, or, rather, he replies to them affirmatively and negatively with equal ardour and equal poetic power.
Another ‘moral idea’ of Ibsen, about which his choristers chatter most loudly, is that of ‘true marriage.’ It is certainly not easy to discover what his mystic brain conceives by these mysterious words, but it is nevertheless possible to guess it from the hundred obscure notions in his plays. He does not seem to approve of the idea that the woman should regard marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In nearly all his pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony peculiar to him. InGhosts, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life’s unhappinessto the fact that she married the chamberlain for his money—that she sold herself. ‘The sums which I have spent upon the orphanage year by year make up the amount—I have reckoned it up precisely—the amount which made Lieutenant Alving a good match in his day.... It was the purchase-money. I do not choose that money should pass into Oswald’s hands’ (p. 149). InThe Lady from the Sea, Ellida sings the same song (p. 139): ‘It could bring nothing but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together.... Yes, we are (doing so), or, at least, we suppress the truth. For the truth ... is, that you came out there and bought me.... I was not a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain—sold myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and so absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the bargain when you came and proposed to provide for me all my life.’ In almost the same words Hedda says (Hedda Gabler, p. 86): ‘And then he would go and make such a tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for me. I did not know why I should not accept it.’ She did not know why; but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final suicide, are the consequence of her having allowed herself to be ‘provided for.’ The regard paid to the ‘being provided for’ became also the lifelong misery of another woman in the same piece—Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally as ‘governess in the house of her future husband.’ She subsequently undertook the management of the household. Then she allowed herself to be married, although ‘everything around him is distasteful to me,’ and ‘we do not possess a thought in common.’ Ibsen condemns the man who marries for money not less than the woman who allows herself to be ‘provided for.’ The cause of Bernick’s moral downfall (The Pillars of Society, p. 56), is chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he loved, but another. ‘It was for no new fancy that I broke with you; it was entirely for the sake of the money.’
Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle to which every rational and moral man will subscribe. But why should one marry? The most reasonable answer can only be, ‘From inclination.’ But Ibsen will have none of this either. The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a love-match. It leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly affirms it (p. 108): ‘You had only seen me and spoken to me a few times. Then you wanted me, and so....’ And then she feels herself a stranger to him, and wishes to leave him. So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted, marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the happiness of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundlyunhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich, and pays for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel marries a girl because she pleases him, and as a reward she wishes to quit him and her home. What conclusion is to be drawn from all this? That marriage from prudence is bad, and marriage from love no better? That marriage in general is worth nothing, and should be abolished? That would be at least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen arrives. Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case of Nora, it is reciprocal. Something else is still necessary—the man must become the educator of his wife. He must help her intellectually. He must let her participate in all his concerns, make of her a companion possessing equal rights, and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she always remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no ‘true marriage.’ ‘I have no right to claim my husband wholly and solely for myself,’ Ellida confesses (The Lady from the Sea, P. 57). ‘Why, I, too, live in something from which others are shut out.’ In the same piece Wangel blames himself in this way (p. 130): ‘I ought to have been at once a father to her and a guide; I ought to have done my best to develop and enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that.... I preferred her just as she was.’ InThe Pillars of SocietyMrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141): ‘For many years I believed that I had at one time possessed you and lost you again. Now I know that I have never possessed you.’ And Lona Hessel draws the moral from this story (p. 97):
And do you never think what she might have been to you—she, whom you chose in my stead?Bernick.I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what I required.Lona.Because you have never shared your life-work with her; because you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you.
And do you never think what she might have been to you—she, whom you chose in my stead?
Bernick.I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what I required.
Lona.Because you have never shared your life-work with her; because you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you.
InRosmersholmRector Kroll has treated his wife in the same way; he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully surprised when she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant who has extinguished her mental light (p. 14). ‘My wife, who all her life long has shared my opinions and concurred in my views both in great things and small, is actually inclined to side with the children on many points. And she blames me for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the children. As if it weren’t necessary to. Well, you see how my house is divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it as possible. It’s best to keep such things quiet.’
Upon this point also there may be complete agreement. Most assuredly should marriage be not merely a union of bodies, but also a community of minds; most assuredly shouldthe man help and educate the wife intellectually, although it is to be remarked that thisrôleof teacher and guardian assigned with justice by Ibsen to the man, decisively excludes the full intellectual equality of the two married parties equally claimed by him. But how can one reconcile with these notions about the true relation between the man and his wife Nora’s words to her husband (A Doll’s House, p. 111): ‘I must first try to educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I must set to work alone. And that is why I am going away from you now.... I must be thrown entirely upon myself’? We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have read aright. What, then, is the duty of the husband in ‘true marriage’? Shall he help his wife intellectually? Wangel, Mrs. Bernick, Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it, and repels all assistance.Farà da se!She will educate and form herself. As though this contradiction were not already sufficiently bewildering, Ibsen still further mocks those pitiable souls, who would fain obtain rules of morality from him, when, inThe Wild Duck, he derides, as he is wont, all that he has preached on the subject of ‘true marriage’ in all the rest of his pieces. In that production a delicious dialogue is brought about between the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer Relling (p. 337):
Gregers.[I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage.Relling.So you don’t find Ekdal’s marriage good enough as it is?Gregers.No doubt it’s as good a marriage as most others, worse luck. But atruemarriage it has never been.Hjalmar.You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.Relling.All rubbish, my boy! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many ... true marriages have you seen in the course of your life?Gregers.Scarcely a single one.Relling.Nor I, either.
Gregers.[I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage.
Relling.So you don’t find Ekdal’s marriage good enough as it is?
Gregers.No doubt it’s as good a marriage as most others, worse luck. But atruemarriage it has never been.
Hjalmar.You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.
Relling.All rubbish, my boy! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many ... true marriages have you seen in the course of your life?
Gregers.Scarcely a single one.
Relling.Nor I, either.
And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar’s words (p. 345): ‘Well, then, isn’t it exasperating to think that it’s not I, but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage?... Isn’t the marriage between your father and Mrs. Sœrby founded upon complete confidence, upon entire and unreserved candour on both sides? They hide nothing from each other. Their relation is based, if I may put it so’ (!) ‘on mutual confession and absolution.’ Hence no one has yet seen a ‘true marriage’; and when by chance this miracle does happen it is fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Sœrby—Mr. Werle, who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young girls and sent old friends to prison in his place—Mrs. Sœrby, who confides to her husband that she has had illicit relations with every imaginable sort of man. It is a tame imitation of the scene inRaskolnikowby Dostojewski, where the assassin and the prostitute, after a contrite confession, unite their soiledand broken lives; except that in Ibsen the scene is stripped of its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and vulgar.
With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in ‘true marriage,’ their husband suddenly becomes ‘a strange man,’ and, without further ceremony, they abandon their home and their children, some, like Nora, ‘to return to their birthplace,’ where ‘it will be easier for me to get something to do of one sort or another’; others, like Ellida, without giving a thought to what will become of them; others, again, like Mrs. Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover and throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously parodied this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for he assigns the laughablerôleof the tragic runaway to a man. ‘I must out into the snow and tempest,’ declaims Hjalmar (The Wild Duck, p. 166), ‘and seek from house to house a shelter for my old father and myself.’ And he really goes, but naturally only to return home the next day, crestfallen, but stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need be said against the idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave-taking, which has become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen spared us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar.
We have not yet done with Ibsen’s drivel on the subject of marriage. He seems to exact that no girl should marry before she is fully matured, and possesses an experience of life and a knowledge of the world and of men (A Dolls House, p. 111):
Nora.And I—how have I been prepared to educate the children?... For that task I am not ready.... I must first try to educate myself.... I cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what is in books.Helmer.You don’t understand the society in which you live.Nora.No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it.
Nora.And I—how have I been prepared to educate the children?... For that task I am not ready.... I must first try to educate myself.... I cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what is in books.
Helmer.You don’t understand the society in which you live.
Nora.No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it.
This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going in quest of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the largest possible number of persons, to make a trial, if possible, of a few men before binding herself definitely. A young girl is thoroughly prepared for marriage when she has attained to a respectable age, managed a few households, perhaps also given birth to sundry children, and in this way proved to herself and others that she understands the duties of a housewife and a mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it is the only reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he is here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and rejected as unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental marriage for a longer or shorter period, the preference for brides endowed with a rich experience in love-affairs and sundry children, all this has already existed. Ibsen may learnall that he needs on this subject from his half-compatriot, Professor Westermarck.[341]But he would be no degenerate if he did not regard as progress the return to conditions of the most primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not mistake the far-away past for the future.
Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his dramas. There should be no marriage from interest (Hedda, Mrs. Alving, Bernick, etc.). There should be no marriage from love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage of prudence is not a true marriage. But to marry because each pleases the other is equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida). The man should be the woman’s instructor and educator (Wangel, Bernick). The wife should not allow herself to be instructed and educated by the husband, but acquire the necessary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the wife discovers that her marriage is not a ‘true marriage,’ she leaves the husband, for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her children, for children which she has had by a stranger are naturally strangers also. She must, however, at the same time remain with the husband, and endeavour to transform him from a stranger into her own husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is not intended permanently to unite two beings. When anything in the one is not agreeable to the other, they return the ring and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving, Ellida, Mrs. Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true marriage (Relling). This is Ibsen’s doctrine concerning marriage. It leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It amply suffices for the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian poet’s intellect.
Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering contradictions, Ibsen’s mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable. We have seen inThe Lady from the Seathat Ellida wishes to abandon her husband, because her marriage is not a true one, and because her husband has become a stranger to her. Why is he a stranger to her? Because he has married her without mutual close acquaintance. ‘You had only seen me and spoken a few words to me.’ She ought not to have let herself be provided for. ‘Rather the meanest labour, rather the most wretched surroundings, so long as they were the result of free will, of free choice.’ From this one can only reasonably conclude that Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless thewoman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has had full freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these conditions existed in the case of the first claimant for her hand. ‘The first—that might have been a complete and real marriage.’ Now, the same Ellida, a few pages before (78), says that she knew absolutely nothing concerning her lover; she did not even know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is spoken of throughout the piece only as ‘the stranger.’
Wangel.What else do you know about him?Ellida.Only that he went to sea very young; and that he had been on long voyages.Wangel.Is there nothing more?Ellida.No; we never spoke of such things.Wangel.Of what did you speak, then?Ellida.About the sea!
Wangel.What else do you know about him?
Ellida.Only that he went to sea very young; and that he had been on long voyages.
Wangel.Is there nothing more?
Ellida.No; we never spoke of such things.
Wangel.Of what did you speak, then?
Ellida.About the sea!
And she betrothed herself to him
Because he said I must.Wangel.You must? Had you no will of your own, then?Ellida.Not when he was near.
Because he said I must.
Wangel.You must? Had you no will of your own, then?
Ellida.Not when he was near.
So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason that, previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly know him, and she must go to ‘the stranger,’ of whom she knows nothing. Her marriage with Wangel is no marriage, because she did not enter into it with perfect freedom of will, but the marriage with ‘the stranger’ will be ‘perfect and pure,’ although when she betrothed herself to him she had ‘no will of her own.’ After this example of his mental maze, it is truly humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning the intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet of the future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself the labour of referring to his other absurdities.
In this sameLady from the Sea, Ellida renounces her project of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the ‘stranger,’ as soon as Wangel says ‘with aching heart’: ‘Now you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.’ She remains with Wangel. She chooses him. ‘Whence came the change?’ asks Wangel and the reader with him. ‘Ah, don’t you understand,’ Ellida gushingly replies, ‘that the change came—was bound to come—when I could choose in freedom!’ (p. 141). This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete contrast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives her her freedom; but she was still freer on the first occasion, because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not need to begin by setting her free. As little was external coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently aftermarriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She has come into no property since her marriage, so far as we know from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to explain the change? There is none. It exists in the confused thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself definitively; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy—experimental marriage.
We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. InGhostsOswald Alving’s disease is represented as a chastisement for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love. Now, Oswald’s state is the consequence of a complaint which may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know better than that. They know hundreds—nay, thousands—of cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen’s drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be a monster of immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an insane son; and his son could be insane without more culpability on the part of the father than is the case with all men who have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother theintermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of Oswald a panegyric on concubinage—one of the most incredible things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ‘What are they to do?’ replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ‘A poor young artist—a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to get married.’ I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ‘free union,’ and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen’s infantine fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum, very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow to the girl he has persuaded to live with him; and religious marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of the civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something agreeable without undertaking any serious duties; or, finally, in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least, excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love, and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their intention to be faithful to each other unto death.
But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying, and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ‘living out one’s life.’ But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of her husband? That all should remain chaste and pure, an idea worked out by Bjornson in hisGlove? No. She is led by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and the law are bad. ‘Oh, that perpetual law and order!’ she exclaims (p. 154); ‘I often think it is that which does all the mischief here in the world.... I can endure all this constraintand cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work my way out to freedom.’ What in the world has Alving’s story to do with ‘law and order?’ and how does ‘freedom’ enter into thisCredo? What connection with the piece have the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into applause. In Tahiti neither ‘order’ nor ‘morals’ reign in the sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties have all the ‘freedom’ to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ‘work her way out,’ and the men so ‘live out their lives’ that ships’ officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. And in that very region Chamberlain Alving’s disease is so widespread that, according to Ibsen’s medical theory, all the young Tahitians must be Oswalds.
But this is a constant habit of Ibsen’s, evidenced in all his pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ‘I don’t know what religion is,’ Nora says in the well-known scene where she leaves her husband (p. 114). ‘... I know nothing but what our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true.... I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I thought they were; but I can’t convince myself that they are right.’ Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her father’s name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39): ‘The laws inquire little into motives.’ The whole of this scene, in view of which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play, and does not originally spring from it. If Nora wishes to abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. InThe Pillars of SocietyBernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces his avowal with the words (p. 110): ‘Let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, itshollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum,’ etc. ‘Speak for yourself, Bernick, speak for yourself,’ one might well call out to the old wind-bag, who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual case. ‘I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made within the last few days,’ exclaims Stockmann inAn Enemy of the People, ‘the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ That may in itself be true; but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato’s republic it might happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general proposition that ‘our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ InRosmersholm, Brendel says in an obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with foreboding (p. 23): ‘We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.’ This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow in the eye in the place where it occurs, forRosmersholmhas no connection with any definite period of time; and it is not necessary to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas—to any age or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.
We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who wish to pick a quarrel: ‘Sir, why did you look at me in that way?’ ‘Pardon me, I did not look at you.’ ‘What! you say, then, that I lie?’ ‘I said nothing of the sort.’ ‘You give me the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.’ This is Ibsen’s method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead, however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naïve farces of our fathers. Cleanse Ibsen’s dramas of these pasted-on phrases, and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as ‘modern’ productions; there will remain only a tissue of absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures, not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis—i.e., some anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world withoutseeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself. In contradiction to the saying of the poet, ‘All that is human is alien to him,’ and his own ‘I’ alone occupies him and absorbs his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem wherein he says, ‘Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day over one’s own self.’[342]
The ‘ghost in the heart and brain’ is the obsessions and impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is nothing but a ‘judgment day’ of the poet over himself, cannot be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with distinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the chief events and central characters are always astonishingly absurd and alien to all the realities of the world.
It is inBrandthat Ibsen’s absurdity apparently achieves its greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiteratedad nauseamthat this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard’s crazy ‘Either-Or.’ Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ‘all or nothing,’ and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. What he especially understands by these high-sounding words the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, however, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness, and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the following wonderful information (p. 151): ‘How long will the struggle last?’ (viz., the climbing, for there is no other struggle in this Act). ‘It lasts until life’s end. Until you have sacrificed all; until you are freed from your compact; until that which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.’ (Whatthis is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ‘Until every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from the All or Nothing. And your sacrifices? All the gods which with you take the place of the eternal God; the shining golden chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid slothfulness. The reward of victory? Unity of will, activity of faith, pureness of soul.’ Naturally on listening to this ranting the good people ‘come to their senses and go home,’ but the lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want to pant uphill in order to ‘wish for something unswervingly,’ to attain to ‘all or nothing,’ and to arrive at ‘unity of will.’ For it is ‘the all’ which seems to inhabit mountains; not merely freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (‘Liberty dwells in the mountains,’ Schiller has said.)
And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling impulse,[343]who with furious passion are continually and reiteratingly talking of ‘the goal’ which they wish to attain, but who neither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is, nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his inflexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.
Ibsen’s absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an idea than the ‘tra-la-la’ sung to a song of which one has forgotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest of function[344]in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are continuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of profundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recognisesthem as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import. Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in consternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of their table companions at the habitual café. I will give some illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.
Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated between intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis of the centres of ideation.
InThe Lady from the Sea(p. 25) Lyngstrand says: ‘I am to a certain extent a little infirm.’[345]This ‘to a certain extent’ is admirable! Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic projects (p. 51):
As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great work—a group,as they call it.Arnholm.Is there anything else?Lyngstrand.Yes, there is to be another figure—a sort of apparition, as they say.
As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great work—a group,as they call it.
Arnholm.Is there anything else?
Lyngstrand.Yes, there is to be another figure—a sort of apparition, as they say.
As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that he intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the sculptor’s mouth. But inHedda Gabler, Brack, a sharp and cleverbon vivant, says (p. 87): ‘But as far as regards myself, you know very well that I have always entertained a—a certain respect for the marriage tie,generally speaking, Mrs. Hedda.’ InRosmersholmBrendel says (p. 24): ‘So you see when golden dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I fashioned them into poems, into visions, into pictures—in the rough, as it were, you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I have enjoyed in my time! The mysterious bliss of creation—in the rough, as I said.’ Rector Kroll says (p. 18): ‘A family that now soon for some centuries has held its place as the first in the land.’[346]‘Now soon for some centuries’! That means that it is not yet ‘some centuries,’ but ‘soon’ will be ‘some centuries.’ Hence ‘soon’ must include in itself ‘some centuries.’ By what miracle? InThe Wild Duckwe have the intentionally, but, in their exaggeration impossibly, idiotic conversations of the ‘fat,’ ‘bald,’ and ‘short-sighted’ gentlemen in the first act, but also this remark by Gina, who is in no way depicted as an idiot (p. 270):
Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father when he comes home in the evening?Hedwig.Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time.Gina.Yes,there is something [true][347]in that!!
Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father when he comes home in the evening?
Hedwig.Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time.
Gina.Yes,there is something [true][347]in that!!
In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal, Gregers and Hjalmar we read (p. 289):
Ekdal.He was out in a boat,you see, and he shot her. But father’s sight is pretty bad now. H’m; he only wounded her.Gregers.Ah! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose.Hjalmar.Yes,two or three....Gregers.And she thrives all right in the garret there?Hjalmar.Yes, wonderfully well. She’s got fat. She’s been in there so long now that she’s forgotten her natural wild life, and it all depends on that.Gregers.You’re right there, Hjalmar.
Ekdal.He was out in a boat,you see, and he shot her. But father’s sight is pretty bad now. H’m; he only wounded her.
Gregers.Ah! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose.
Hjalmar.Yes,two or three....
Gregers.And she thrives all right in the garret there?
Hjalmar.Yes, wonderfully well. She’s got fat. She’s been in there so long now that she’s forgotten her natural wild life, and it all depends on that.
Gregers.You’re right there, Hjalmar.
And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle (p. 305):
Hedwig.... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new basket for the wild duck.Gregers.So you could; and it was, strictly speaking, your business, wasn’t it?Hedwig.Yes, for she’smywild duck.Gregers.Of course she is!
Hedwig.... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new basket for the wild duck.
Gregers.So you could; and it was, strictly speaking, your business, wasn’t it?
Hedwig.Yes, for she’smywild duck.
Gregers.Of course she is!
Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively profound, but in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness.
InA Doll’s House(p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion: ‘Well, after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and get them safe in;’ to which Rank significantly replies: ‘Yes, so people say. And it is that very consideration which turns society into a hospital.’ What does this meditative and oracular speech mean? Is it Rank’s opinion that society is a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it would be healthy if its sick were not cared for? Would the untended sick be any less sick? If he believes that he believes an idiocy. Or are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in this manner got rid of? If he preaches that, he preaches a barbarism and a crime, and that is not in accordance with Rank’s character as Ibsen depicts him. We may turn and twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always find either stupidity or want of meaning.
InRosmersholm, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ‘devote all his life and all his energies to this one thing—the creation of a true democracy in this country.’ And, wonderful to relate, the persons to whom Rosmer says these words all seem to comprehend what the ‘true democracy’ is. Without being asked, Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of his Pythian utterance: ‘I want to awaken the democracy to its true task—that of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by setting free their minds and purifying their wills.... I will only try to arouse them to their task. They themselves must accomplish it ... by their own strength. There is no other.... Peace and joy and mutual forbearance must once more enterinto their souls.’ Rebecca repeats to him his programme (p. 62):