You were to set resolutely to work in the world—the living world of to-day, as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to home; to win over minds and wills; to create noble men around you in wider and wider circles. Noblemen.Rosmer.Joyful noblemen.Rebecca.Yes, joyful.Rosmer.For it is joy that ennobles the mind.It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer going ‘from home to home’ ‘in wider and wider circles,’ and making the persons before whom he talks into ‘joyful noblemen,’ while he ‘awakens’ them and ‘purifies their wills,’ and thus ‘creates a true democracy.’ This rigmarole is, it is true, incomprehensible; but, at all events, it must be something agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs ‘joy’ to create ‘noblemen.’ And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly discovers (p. 102): ‘The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.’ What! Rosmer kill happiness when he ‘goes from home to home,’ awakening, winning, making people free, etc., and creating joyful noblemen? The word ‘joyful’ includes, at least, something of happiness, and yet the education of men to ‘joyful noblemen’ is to kill happiness? Rosmer finds (p. 97) ‘the work of ennobling men’s minds is not for him. And, besides, it is so hopeless in itself.’ This is in a measure intelligible, though it is not stated from what experience Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite beyond comprehension is Rebecca’s speech about the fatal influence of ‘the Rosmer view of life.’ InGhosts, Mrs. Alving endeavours to explain her defunct husband’s vagaries in this balderdash (p. 187): ‘When he was a young lieutenant, he was brimming over with the joy of life. It was like a breezy day only to look at him. And what exuberant strength and vitality there was in him! And then, child of joy as he was—for hewaslike a child at the time—he had to live here at home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him, but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an office. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant, only loungers and boon companions.’ These antitheses seem to have something in them; but if we seriously set about hunting for a definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ‘Object in life—office’—‘work—business’—‘comrades—boon companions,’ are not in themselves oppositions, but become such through the individual. With a decent man they are perfectly coincident; with a base man they fall into opposition. A large or a smalltown has nothing to do with it. For Kant in the small town of Kœnigsberg, in the last century, the ‘office’ was ‘the object in life,’ ‘work’ was ‘business,’ and he so chose his ‘boon companions’ that they were at the same time his ‘comrades,’ as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other hand, there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle of men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could feel at ease and in inward harmony.InHedda Gablerwe find quite a multitude of such words, apparently saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ‘It was the passion for life in you!’ exclaims Lövborg to Hedda (p. 128), with the seeming conviction that he has, in this utterance, explained something to her. And Hedda says (p. 142): ‘Isee him before me. With vine-leaves in his hair. Hot and bold’ (p. 151). ‘And Ejlert Lövborg, he is sitting with vine-leaves in his hair, and reading aloud’ (p. 157). ‘Had he vine-leaves in his hair?’ (p. 171). ‘So that is how it all happened. Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair’ (p. 188).Hedda.Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully?Lövborg.Gracefully? With vine-leaves in my hair?‘With vine-leaves in his hair;’ ‘the passion for life’—these are words meaning, in the connection assigned to them, absolutely nothing, but giving scope for dreaming. In a few instances Ibsen employs these dreamily-nebulous, shadowy expressions with poetic licence,e.g., when we read inThe Pillars of Society(p. 19):Rörlund.Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me?Dina.Because you teach me so much that is beautiful.Rörlund.Beautiful? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful?Dina.Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing; but when I hear you speak, it makes me think of so much that is beautiful.Rörlund.What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing?Dina.I have never thought of that.Rörlund.Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful thing?Dina.A beautiful thing is something great and far away.Dina is a young girl living under sad and painful conditions. It is psychologically accurate that she should condense all her longing for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional colouring, such as ‘beautiful.’ It is the same with the dialogue between Gregers and Hedwig inThe Wild Duck(p. 53):Gregers.And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the sea.Hedwig.Why do you say ‘in the depths of the sea’?Gregers.What else could I say?Hedwig.You could say ‘the bottom of the sea’ [or ‘at the bottom of the water’].[348]Gregers.Oh, mayn’t I just as well say the depths of the sea?Hedwig.Yes; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak of the depths of the sea.Gregers.Why so?...Hedwig.... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that’s so stupid.... Because it’s only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty (Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is changing, and that she willingly plays with fire); hence it is natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams, and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting something far away and wild, such as ‘in the depths of the sea,’ with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous surging in her. But when expressions of this sort are used, not by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words ‘joy of life’ appear inGhosts(p. 176):Oswald.... She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).Mrs. Alving.What were you saying about the joy of life?Oswald.Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life?—always, always upon the joy of life? (p. 187).Mrs. Alving.You spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father.... He was brimming over with the joy of life.InHedda Gablerthe word ‘beauty’ plays a similar part (p. 190):Hedda(toLövborg).Youuse it [the pistol] now.... And do it beautifully (p. 214).Hedda.I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lövborg’s suicide] (p. 219).Hedda.A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of voluntary courage to take place in the world. Something over which there falls a veil of unintentional beauty.... And then now—the great act! That over which the sense of beauty falls!The ‘vine-leaves in the hair,’ in the same piece, belongs with equal exactness to this category of words, amounting to an obsession. The use of expressions full of mystery, incomprehensible to the hearer, and either freely coined by the speaker, or endowed by him with a peculiar sense, deviating from that usually assigned them in speech, is one of the most frequent phenomena among the mentally deranged. Griesinger[349]oftenlays stress on this, and A. Marie[350]adduces some characteristic examples of words and phrases, either newly invented or employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which have been repeated by the insane.Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a dweller on the borderland—a ‘mattoid.’ His use of formalized expressions does not therefore go so far as the invention of new words, as cited by Dr. Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious meaning to the expressions ‘beauty,’ ‘joy of life,’ ‘courage of life,’ etc., and one which they do not possess when rationally used, follows clearly enough from the examples quoted.Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense, corresponding to conversations held in dreams, and the silly rambling speech of persons suffering from fever or acute mania. InThe Lady from the Sea, Ellida says (p. 39): ‘The water in the fjord here is sick, ... yes, sick. And I believe it makes one sick, too’ (p. 79). ‘We’ (Ellida and the ‘stranger’) ‘spoke of the gulls and the eagles, and all the other sea-birds. I think—isn’t it wonderful?—when we talked of such things it seemed to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one with him.... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too’ (p. 100).I don’t think the dry land is really our home.... I think that if only men had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea, orinthe sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are—with better and happier....Arnholm(jestingly). Well, perhaps! But it can’t be helped. We’ve once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it’s too late to make good the mistake now.Ellida.Yes, you’ve spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as a secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause for the sadness of men.And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says (p. 129):And then she is so changeable, so capricious—she varies so suddenly.Arnholm.No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind.Wangel.Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That is the matter(!!).We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory, blurred, deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and the dream-like drivel, have essentially conduced to obtain for Ibsen his particular admirers. Over them hysterical mystics can dream, like Dina and Hedwig, over the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘in the depths of the sea.’ As they mean absolutely nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them whatever significance may be suggested by the play of association under the influence of momentary emotion. They are, moreover, exceedingly grateful material for the (so-called) ‘comprehensives,’ for whom nothing is ever obscure. ‘Comprehensives’ always explain everything. The greater the idiocy, the more involved, the richer in import, the more exhaustive is its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance with which these beings of ‘perfect comprehension’ look down upon the barbarian, who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian.In an exceedingly amusing French farce,Le Homard, a husband suddenly returning home one evening surprises a stranger with his wife. The latter does not lose her presence of mind, and says to the husband that, having suddenly been seized with illness, she had sent her maid for the first available doctor, and that this gentleman was the doctor. The husband thanks the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if he has already prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is not a doctor, tries to make himself scarce; but the anxious husband insists on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a glance at it; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ‘And will the chemist be able to read that?’ asks the husband, shaking his head. ‘As if it were print,’ asseverates the false physician, again trying to make his escape. The husband, however, adjures him to remain, and holds him fast until the maid returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she makes her appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe. No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and some powders. ‘Did the chemist give you those?’ demands the Galen in bewilderment. ‘Certainly.’ ‘On my prescription?’ ‘Of course it was on your prescription,’ replies the astonished maid. ‘Has the chemist made some mistake?’ interposes the troubled husband. ‘No, no,’ our Galen hastens to reply; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time, and becomes lost in reverie.These ‘comprehensives’ are like the chemist inLe Homard. They read with fluency all Ibsen’s prescriptions, and especially those containing absolutely no written characters, but simply crow’s feet devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to supply critical pills and electuaries when a piece of paper is brought to them bearing the signature of a self-styled doctor,and they dispense them without wincing, be there anything of any sort, or even nothing, on the slip of paper. Is it not significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the French mystic De Vogué, one of these ‘comprehensives,’ finds to praise is one of the meaningless phrases above cited?[351]A final stigma of Ibsen’s mysticism must be considered—his symbolism. InThe Wild Duck, this bird is the symbol of Hjalmar’s destiny, and the garret next the photographic studio a symbol of the ‘living lie,’ of which, according to Relling, everyone stands in need. InThe Lady from the Sea, Lyngstrand wishes to make a group which shall be the symbol of Ellida, as the ‘stranger’ with the changing eyes of a fish is of the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ‘stranger’ is really the symbol of a symbol. InGhosts, the burning of the asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving’s ‘living lie,’ and the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole piece the symbol of the depressed and sullen frame of mind of the personages in action. Ibsen’s earlier pieces,Emperor and Galilean,Brand,Peer Gynt, literally swarm with symbols. A mysterious collateral significance is given to every figure and every stage accessory, and every word includes a double meaning. From the ‘Psychology of Mysticism’ we already know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus of the wholly unconnected representations springing up in consciousness through the play of automatic association, that it attributes hidden but essential reference to each other in these representations. The ‘comprehensives’ believe they have said all when, with an extremely consequential and self-satisfied air, they demonstrate that the ‘stranger’ inThe Lady from the Seasignifies the sea, and the sea freedom. They quite overlook the fact that the thing to be explained is not what the poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in particular, why he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all. In the well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet calls ‘a cat a cat.’ That to express so sober an idea as that persons of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep longing for a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should have the whim to invent a ‘stranger with fish-like eyes,’ presupposesa diseased mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency to allegory and symbolism is very common. ‘Intricate arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic gestures and attitudes, strange interpretations of natural events, punning, word-coining, and peculiar modes of expression, frequently occurring in paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque colouring.’ Thus writes Tanzi,[352]and in the symbolism of the insane he saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism. Among men low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in fact, the habitual form of thought. We know the reason—their brain is not yet trained to attention; it is too weak to suppress irrational associations, and refers all that shoots through its consciousness to some chance phenomenon either just perceived, or else remembered.After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we have become acquainted—his theological obsessions of original sin, of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his symbolism—he might be numbered among the mystic degenerates with which I have concerned myself in the previous chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his place among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic than his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of anarchism. He is in a state of constant revolt against all that exists. He never exercises rational criticism with regard to this; he never shows what is bad, why it is bad, and how it could be made better. No; he only reproaches it with its existence, and has only one longing—to destroy it. ‘The ruin of everything’ was the programme of certain destructives in 1848, and has remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem,To my Friend the Destructive Orator. In this he glorifies the deluge as the ‘sole revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler’ (Halohedsfusker); but even it was not radically ruinous enough. ‘We want to make it still more radical, but for that end we need men and orators. You charge yourselves with flooding the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully a torpedo under the ark.’[353]In a series of letters offered by elephant-driver Brandesfor the edification of the adorers of Ibsen, the poet gives conspicuous specimens of his theories.[354]The state must be destroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for freedom has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its own end. As soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and cease to fight for it, we prove it to be lost to us. The meritorious thing in the fight for liberty is the state of permanent revolt against all existing things which it presupposes. There is nothing fixed and permanent. ‘Who warrants me that in the planet Jupiter twice two are not five?’ (This remark is an unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt,[355]which in recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true marriage. Friends are a costly luxury. ‘They have long hindered me from being myself.’ The care of the ‘I’ is the sole task of man. He ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it by any law or any consideration.These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also puts into the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already cited some of Mrs. Alving’s and Nora’s ego-maniacal and anarchical phrases. InThe Pillars of Society, Dina says (p. 19): ‘If only the people I lived amongst weren’t so proper and moral. Every day Hilda and Netta come here that I may take example by them. I can never be as well behaved as they are, and Iwon’t be’ (p. 44).But I wanted to know, too, if people over there [in America] are very—very moral ... if they are so—so proper and well-behaved as here.Johan.Well, at any rate, they’re not so bad as people here think.Dina.You don’t understand me. What I want is just that they should not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness.Martha Bernick.Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and convention! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and-wont!InAn Enemy of the People(p. 278) Stockmann declares: ‘I detest leading men ... they stand in the path of a free man wherever he turns—and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other noxious animals.’ (p. 280) ‘The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are thecompact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal majority—they it is.... The majority is never right.... The minority is always right.’ Where Ibsen does not seriously attack the majority he derides it—e.g., when he entrusts the maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. InAn Enemy of the People(p. 238):Burgomaster.You want to fly in the face of your superiors; and that’s an old habit of yours. You can’t endure any authority over youInRosmersholm(p. 53):Mortensgaard[the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer—I almost might say too many. What the party requires is a Christian element—something that everyone must respect. That’s what we’re sadly in need of.With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always personifies the sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees only. InGhoststhe blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches (p. 142): ‘What right have we human beings to happiness? No, we have to do our duty! And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you are bound by a holy tie.’ InThe Pillars of Societyit is the rogue Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordination of the individual to the community (p. 58): ‘People must learn to moderate their personal claims if they are to fulfil their duties in the community in which they are placed.’ InAn Enemy of the Peoplethe not less pitiable burgomaster sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this fashion (p. 209): ‘Anyhow, you’ve an ingrained propensity for going your own way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole community.’The trick is evident: to make the conception of the necessary subordination of the individual ridiculous and contemptible, Ibsen appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible beings. On the other hand, it is the characters on whom he lavishes all the wealth of his affection to whom he entrusts the duty of defending rebellion against duty, the aspersion or derision of laws, morals, institutions, self-discipline, and the proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the sole guide of life.The psychological roots of Ibsen’s anti-social impulses are well known. They are the degenerate’s incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resulting discomfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate himself. ‘The criminal,’ Lombroso[356]says, ‘in consequence of his neurotic and impulsive nature, and his hatred of the institutions which have punished or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, who finds in insurrection the means not only of satisfying his passions, but of even having them countenanced for the first time by a numerous public.’ This utterance is exactly applicable to Ibsen, with the slight change, that he is merely a theoretic criminal, his motor centres not being powerful enough to transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into deeds, and that he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses not in the insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition.His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an anarchist, but also a misanthrope, and fills him with a profound weariness of life. The doctrine ofAn Enemy of the Peopleis contained in Stockmann’s exclamation (p. 315): ‘The strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone’; and inRosmersholm(p. 24), Brendel says: ‘I like to take my pleasures in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.’ The same Brendel subsequently laments (p. 105): ‘I am going homewards; I am home-sick for the mighty Void.... Peter Mortensgaard never wills more than he can do. Peter Mortensgaard is capable of living his life without ideals. And that, do you see, that is just the mighty secret of action and of victory. It is the sum of the whole world’s wisdom.... The dark night is best. Peace be with you!’ Brendel’s words have a peculiar significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,[357]Ibsen wished to portray himself in that personage. That which is expressed in these passages is thedégoût des gensand thetedium vitæof alienists, phenomena never absent in depressed forms of mental alienation.In addition to his mysticism and ego-mania, Ibsen’s extraordinary poverty of ideas indicates another stigma of degeneracy. Superficial or ignorant judges, who appraise an artist’s intellectual wealth by the number of volumes he has produced, believe that when they point at the high pile of a degenerate’s works they have victoriously refuted the accusation of his infecundity. The well-informed are of course not entrapped by this paltry method of proof. The history of insane literature knows of a large number of cases in which fools have written and published dozens of thick volumes. For tens of years and in feverish haste they must have driven the pen, almost continuously, night and day; but since allthese bulky tomes contain not a single idea of any utility, this restless activity is not to be termed fruitful, in spite of the abundant typographical results. We have seen that Richard Wagner never invented a tale, a figure, a situation; but that he sponged on ancient poems or the Bible. Ibsen has almost as little genuine original creative power as his intellectual relative, and as he, in his beggar’s pride, disdains for the most part to borrow from other poets of procreative capacity, or from popular traditions exuberant with life, his poems reveal, when closely and keenly examined, an even greater poverty than those of Wagner. If we do not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the art of variation in a contrapuntist extraordinarily clever in dramatic technique, and follow the themes he so adroitly elaborates, we at once recognise their dreary monotony.At the central point of all his pieces (with the exception of those of a romantic character, written by him in his first period of pure imitation) stand two figures, always the same and fundamentally one, but having now a negative and now a positive sign, a thesis and antithesis in the Hegelian sense. They are, on the one hand, the human being who obeys his inner law only (that is, his ego-mania), and dauntlessly and defiantly makes a parade of it; and, on the other, the individual who, it is true, really acts in obedience to his ego-mania only, but has not the courage to display it, feigning respect for the law of others and for the notions of the majority—in other words, the avowed and violent anarchist, and his opposite, the crafty and timorously deceitful anarchist.The avowed ego-maniac is, with one single exception, always embodied in a woman. The exception is Brand. On the contrary, the hypocrite is always a man—again with a single exception, viz., that of Hedda Gabler, who does not personify the idea in its purity, frank anarchism in her nature being mingled with something of hypocrisy. Nora (A Doll’s House), Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Selma Malsberg (The League of the Young), Dina, Martha Hessel, Mrs. Bernick (The Pillars of Society), Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca (Rosmersholm), are one and the same figure, but seen, as it were, at different hours of the day, and consequently in different lights. Some are in the major, others in the minor, key; some are more, others less hysterically deranged; but essentially they are not only similar, but identical. Selma Malsberg (p. 60) cries: ‘Bear our unhappiness in common? Am I yet good enough? No. I can no longer keep silent, be a hypocrite and a liar. Now you shall know.... O, how you have wronged me! Infamously, all of you!... How I have thirsted for a drop of your care! But when I begged for ityou repulsed me with a polite joke. You dressed me like a doll. You played with me as with a child.... I want to go away from you.... Let me, let me.’ And Nora (p. 110): ‘I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald.... You and your father have sinned greatly against me. It is the fault of you two that nothing has been made of me. I was never happy, only merry.... Our house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa’s doll-child.... That is why I am going away from you now.... I shall now leave your house at once.’ Ellida (The Lady from the Sea): ‘What I want is that we should, of our own free will, release each other.... I am not what you took me for. Now you see it yourself. Now we can separate as friends, and freely.... Here there is no single thing that attracts me and binds me. I am so absolutely rootless in your house, Wangel.’ Selma threatens to leave, Ellida resolves to leave, Nora does leave, Mrs. Alving did leave. (Ghosts, p. 144) Pastor Manders: ‘All your efforts have been bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You have never been willing to endure any bond. Everything that has weighed upon you in life you have cast away without care or conscience, like a burden you could throw off at will. It did not please you to be a wife any longer, and you left your husband. You found it troublesome to be a mother, and you sent your child forth among strangers.’ Mrs. Bernick was, equally with her double, Mrs. Alving, a stranger in her own house. She, however, does not wish to leave, but to remain and endeavour to win over her husband (p. 112): ‘For many years I believed that you had once been mine, and I had lost you again. Now I know that you never were mine; but I shall win you.’ Dina (The Pillars of Society) cannot leave because she is not yet married, but as becomes her state of maidenhood, she gives her rebellious thoughts this form (p. 93): ‘I will be your wife; but first I will work, and become something for myself, just as you are. I will give myself; I will not be taken.’ Rebecca (Rosmersholm) is also unmarried, yet she runs away (p. 96):I am going.Rosmer.Where are you going, Rebecca?Rebecca.North, by the steamer. It was there I came from.Rosmer.But you have no ties there now.Rebecca.I have none here either.Rosmer.What do you think of doing?Rebecca.I don’t know. I only want to have done with it all.Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies his ego-mania without giving offence to society. This personage presents himself under the names successively ofTorvald Helmer, Consul Bernick, Curate Rörlund, Rector Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster Stockmann, Werle, and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler, always with the same ideas and the same words. InA Doll’s House(p. 104,et seq.), after his wife’s confession, Helmer cries: ‘Oh, what an awful awakening!... No religion, no morality, no sense of duty.... He can publish the whole story; and if he does publish it, perhaps I should be suspected of having been a party to your criminal transactions.... I must try to pacify him in one way or the other. The story must be kept secret, cost what it may.’ InGhostsPastor Manders on different occasions expresses himself thus: ‘One is certainly not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and thinks within one’s own four walls.... We must not expose ourselves to false interpretations, and we have no right whatever to give offence to our neighbours.... You go and risk your good name and reputation, and nearly succeed in ruining other people’s reputation into the bargain. It was unspeakably reckless of you to seek refuge with me.... Yes, that is the only thing possible’ (to ‘hush the matter up’) ‘... yes, family life is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such a case as you point to’ (an incestuous union), ‘one can never know.’ Rörlund (The Pillars of Society): ‘See how the family is undermined over there! how a brazen spirit of destruction is attacking the most vital truths!... Of course, a tare now and then springs up among the wheat, alas! but we honestly do our best to weed it out.... Oh, Dina, you can form no conception of the thousand considerations! When a man is placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why—he cannot be too careful.... Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me! Hush! someone is coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the others.... A good book forms a refreshing contrast to what we unhappily see every day in newspapers and magazines.’ Consul Bernick, in the same piece: ‘Just at this time, when I depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press and in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all over the country-side.... These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping at us.... I whose mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t do for me to have my name bespattered in this way.... I must keep my conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression on both the press and the public at large when they see that I set aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its course.’ Kroll, inRosmersholm: ‘Do you ever see the Radical papers?... But you’ve seen, then, I suppose, how these gentlemen of “the people” have been pleased to treat me?what infamous abuse they’ve dared to heap upon me?’ Werle, inThe Wild Duck: ‘Even if, out of attachment to me, she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that——?’ The Burgomaster, inAn Enemy of the People: ‘If, perhaps, I do watch over my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the good of the town.... Your statement ... must be kept back for the good of all ... we will do the best we can quietly; but nothing whatever, not a single word, of this unfortunate business must be made public.... And then you have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every possible and impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an idea than you must write at once some newspaper article or a whole pamphlet about it.’ Finally, Hedda Gabler: ‘And so you went off perfectly openly?... But what do you suppose that people will say about you, then?... I so dread a scandal! You should accept for your own sake, or, better still, for the world’s sake.’If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are read successively, an impression must be formed that they are part of the samerôle; and this impression is correct, for under all the different names there is only onerôle. The same is true of the women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora, unselfishly sacrifice themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel, Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are always the same figure in different guises. The monotony, moreover, extends to minutest details. Rank’s inherited disease is in Oswald’s case only carried further. Nora’s flight is repeated in almost every piece, and inThe Wild Duckis travestied in Hjalmar’s departure from his house. One feature of this scene appears word for word in all theréchauffésof it:Nora.Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage everything in the house far better than I do.Ellida.If I do go ... I haven’t a key to give up, an order to give.... I am absolutely rootless in your house, etc.InA Doll’s House, the heroine, who has settled her account with life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe, makes Rank play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she dances to it. InHedda Gabler, the heroine is heard ‘suddenly playing a wild dance’ before she shoots herself. Rosmer says to Rebecca, when the latter makes known her wish to die: ‘No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do whatshedared.’ The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to commit suicide: ‘Oh, you don’t frighten me! An elegant spoilt lady like you.... People don’t do things of that sort.’ Brack says, in response to Hedda Gabler’s outburst: ‘Rather die! That’s what people say, but nobody does it!’ In muchthe same words Helmer reproaches his wife Nora with having sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor Manders upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick, and Rebecca from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle’s crime was the seduction of the maidservant Gina. Alving’s crime was the seduction of his own maidservant. This pitiable and imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this impotence of his indolent brain to wash out the imprint of an idea once painfully elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of names for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under the influence of a reminiscence. InA Doll’s Housewe have Helmer; inThe Wild Duck, Hjalmar; inThe Pillars of Society, Hilmar, Mrs. Bernick’s brother.Thus Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees, at each shaking of the cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this toy. But adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always the same, inserted haphazard, and united into symmetrical figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not only to Ibsen’s plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for thirty years he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic patterns, these are his obsessions. These have existed in his own diseased mind, and have not sprung from observation of the world’s drama. The pretended ‘realist’ knows nothing of real life. He does not comprehend it; he does not even see it, and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions, ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manufacturing cannon is to take a tube and pour molten metal round it. Ibsen proceeds in a similar way with his poems. He has a thesis—more accurately, some anarchistic folly; this is the tube. It is now only a question of enveloping this tube with the metal of life’s realities. But that lies beyond Ibsen’s power. At best he occasionally finds some bits of worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box, by rummaging among dust-heaps; but this small quantity of metal does not suffice for a cannon. Where Ibsen makes strenuous efforts to produce a picture of actual contemporaneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his experience.Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this. It sinks below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber and Sir John Lubbock have recorded incidents of this sortin their observations of colonies of ants. The small features pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole life have never formed a clearer thought than: ‘How can I get hold of a bottle of brandy?’ or ‘How can I make myself interesting to men?’ The sole characteristic distinguishing these Lövborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas, do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to require strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the obtaining of a position in a bank (A Doll’s House); their catastrophes, that one no longer believes in the articles of their creed (Rosmersholm); the loss of an appointment as physician at a watering-place (An Enemy of the People); the raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnalpéché de jeunesse(The Pillars of Society); the frightful crimes darkening, like a thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their social circle are an intrigue with a maidservant (Ghosts,The Wild Duck); aliaisonwith an itinerant music-hall singer (An Enemy of the People); the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (The Wild Duck); the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good dinner (Hedda Gabler). It sometimes happens to me to pass a half-hour in the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter and play of the little ones. One day the children by accident saw the arrest of someone in the street. Although their attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant spectacle, they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found them full of the great event, and I became the auditor of the following dialogue:Matilda(aged three years). Why did they put the gentleman in prison?Richard(five years old, very dignified and sententious). It wasn’t a gentleman; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was wicked.Matilda.What had he done then?Richard(after reflecting a little). His mamma had said he wasn’t to take chocolate; but he did take chocolate. That’s why his mamma had him put in prison.This childish conversation always came into my mind when I lighted, in Ibsen’s plays, upon one of his crimes treated with such overawing importance.We have now made the complete tour of Ibsen. At the risk of being prolix and tedious, I have made copious quotations from his writings, in order that the reader might himself see the matter from which I have formed my judgments.Ibsen stands before us as a mystic and an ego-maniac, who would willingly prove the world and mankind not worth powder and shot, but who only proves that he has not the faintest inkling of one or the other. Incapable of adapting himself to any state of things whatsoever, he first abuses the state of things in Norway, then that of Europe generally. In no one of his productions is a single thought to be met with belonging to, or having an active influence on, the present age, unless we bestow this honour on his anarchism, which is explained by the diseased constitution of his mind, and his travesties of the least certain results of investigations in hypnotism and telepathy. He is a skilful dramatic technician, and knows how to represent with great poetic power personages in the background, and situations out of the chief current of the piece. This, however, is all that a conscientious and lucid analysis can really find in him. He has dared to speak of his ‘moral ideas,’ and his admirers glibly repeat the expression. Ibsen’s moral ideas! Any reader of the Ibsen drama, who finds inthemno food for laughter, has truly no sense of humour. He seems to preach apostacy, yet cannot free himself from the religious ideas of confession, original sin, and the Saviour’s act of redemption. He sets up egoism and the freedom of the individual from all scruples as an ideal, yet hardly has anyone acted somewhat unscrupulously, but he begins to whimper contritely, and continues until his heart, full to suffocation, has poured itself out in confession; while the only persons with whom he succeeds are women, who sacrifice their individuality to the point of annihilation for the sake of others. He extols every offence against morality as heroism, while he punishes, with nothing less than death, the smallest and stupidest love affair. He uses the words freedom, progress, etc., as a gargle, and in his best works honours lying and stagnation. And all these contradictions appear forsooth not successively as stations on the road of his development, but at one and the same time, and side by side. His French admirer, Ehrhard,[358]sees this disconcerting fact, and endeavours as best he can to excuse it. His Norwegian interpreter, Henrik Jaeger, on the contrary, asserts with the utmost placidity[359]that the most prominent characteristic of Ibsen’s works is their unity(Enhed). The Frenchman and the Norwegian were most incautious in not preconcerting, prior to praising their great man in manners so divergent. The single discoverable unity in Ibsen is his faculty of distortion. The point in which he always resembles himself is his entire incapacity to elaborate a single clear thought, to comprehend a single one of the watchwords daubed here and there on to his works, or to deduce the true conclusions from a single one of his premises.And this malignant, anti-social simpleton, highly gifted, it must be admitted, in the technique of the stage, they have had the audacity to try to raise upon the shield as the great world-poet of the closing century. His partizans have continued to shout, ‘Ibsen is a great poet!’ until all stronger judgments have become at least hesitating, and feebler ones wholly subjugated. In a recent book on Simon Magus,[360]there occurs this pretty story: ‘Apsethus, the Libyan, wished to become a god. In spite, however, of his most strenuous efforts he could not succeed in satisfying his longing. But, at any rate, he would make the people believe that he had become a god. He therefore collected a large number of parrots, in which Libya abounds, and shut them all in a cage. He kept them so for some time, and taught them to say, “Apsethus is a god.” When the birds had learnt this, he opened the cage and set them free. And the birds spread themselves throughout Libya, so that the words penetrated to the Greek settlements. And the Libyans, astonished at the voice of the birds, and not suspecting the trick Apsethus had played, looked upon him as a god.’ In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, Ibsen has taught a few ‘comprehensives’—the Brandes, Ehrhards, Jaegers, etc.—the words: ‘Ibsen is a modern! Ibsen is a poet of the future!’ and the parrots have spread over all the lands, and are chattering with deafening din in books and papers, ‘Ibsen is great! Ibsen is a modern spirit!’ and imbeciles among the public murmur the cry after them, because they hear it frequently repeated, and because, on such as they, every word uttered with emphasis and assurance makes an impression.It would certainly be a proof of superficiality to believe that the audacity of his Corybantes alone explains the high place to which Ibsen has been fraudulently elevated. Without question he possesses characteristics by which he could not but act upon his contemporaries.Firstly, we have his vague phrases and indefinite incidental hints concerning ‘the great epoch in which we live,’ ‘the new era about to dawn,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘progress,’ etc. These phrases were bound to please all dreamers and drivellers, for theygive free scope to any interpretation, and, in particular, allow the presumption that their author is possessed of modernity and a bold spirit of progress. They are not discouraged by the fact that Ibsen himself makes cruel sport of these ‘comprehensives,’ when, inThe Wild Duck, he makes Relling (p. 361) use the word ‘demoniac,’ while admitting it to be wholly meaningless, just as the poet himself employs his own bunkum about progress and freedom. They are ‘comprehensives’ precisely because they interpret every passage according to their own sweet will.Then there is Ibsen’s doctrine of the right of the individual to live in accordance with his own law. Is this really his doctrine? This must be denied when, after struggling through his countless contradictions and self-refutations, we see that he treats with peculiar affection the sacrificial lambs, who are all negation of their own ‘I,’ all suppression of their most natural impulses, all neighbourly love and consideration for others. In any case, his apostles have brought forward anarchistic individualism as the central doctrine of his drama. Ehrhard[361]sums up this doctrine in these words: ‘The revolt of the individual against society. In other words, Ibsen is the apostle of moral autonomy (autonomie morale).’ Now such a doctrine is surely well fitted to cause ravages among the intellectually indolent or intellectually incapable.Ehrhard dares to use the expression ‘moral autonomy.’ In the name of this fine principle Ibsen’s critical heralds persuade the youth who gather round him that they have the right to ‘live out their lives,’ and they smile approvingly when their auditors understand by this term the right to yield to their basest instincts and to free themselves from all discipline. As the scoundrels in Mediterranean ports do with well-dressed travellers, they whisper in the ear of their public, ‘Amuse yourselves! Enjoy yourselves! Come with me; I will show you the way!’ But to confound ‘moral autonomy’ with absence of restraint is, on the part of their faith, a monstrous error, and in the corrupters of youth, hoping for the pay of procuration, an infamous deception.These two notions are not only not synonymous, they are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Liberty of the individual! The right to autonomy! The Ego its own legislator! Who is this ‘I’ that is to make laws for itself? Who is this ‘Self’ for whom Ibsen demands the right of autonomy? Who is this free individual? That the entire notion of a Self opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and exclusive is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen in the chapter on the ‘Psychology of Ego-mania,’ and I neednot, therefore, dwell again on the subject in this place. We know that man, like every other complex and highly developed living being, is a society or state, of simpler, and of simplest, living beings, of cells and cell-systems, or organs, all having their own functions and wants. In the course of the development of life on earth they have become associated, and have undergone changes, in order to be able to perform higher functions than are possible to the simple cell and primitive agglomeration of cells. The highest function of life yet known to us is clear consciousness; the most elevated content of consciousness is knowledge; and the most obvious and immediate aim of knowledge is constantly to procure better conditions of life for the organism, hence to preserve its existence as long as possible, and to fill it with the greatest possible number of pleasurable sensations. In order that the collective organism may be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound to submit to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its interior is disease, and leads rapidly to death. The single cell executes its chemical work of decomposition and of integration without troubling itself about aught else. It labours almost for itself alone. Its consciousness is the most limited conceivable; it has hardly any prevision; its own power of adaptation is so minute that if a cell is in the smallest degree less well nourished than its neighbour, it cannot hold its ground against the latter, and is immediately devoured by it.[362]The differentiated cell-group, or organ, already possesses a wider consciousness, whose seat is its own nerve-ganglia; its function is more complex, and no longer operates wholly, or even chiefly, for its own benefit, but for that of the collective organism; it also has already, I might say, a constitutional influence on the direction of the affairs of the whole organism, asserting itself in the power of the organ to suggest to consciousness presentations prompting the will to acts. The most exalted organ, however, the condensation of all the other organs, is the gray cerebral cortex. It is the seat of clear consciousness. It works least of all for itself, most of all for the commonwealth—i.e., for the whole organism. It is the government of the State. To it come all reports from the interior as well as the exterior; it has to find its way in the midst of all complications; it has to exercise foresight, and to take into consideration not only the immediate effect of an act,but also the more remote consequences for the commonwealth. When, therefore, it is a question of the ‘I,’ the ‘Self,’ the ‘Individual,’ it cannot be any subordinate part of the organism which is meant, such as the little toe or the rectum, but only the gray cerebral cortex. To it certainly belongs the right and duty of directing the individual and of prescribing its law. It is consciousness itself. But how does consciousness form its judgments and its decisions? It forms them from representations awakened in it by excitations proceeding from the internal organs and from the senses. If consciousness allows itself to be directed solely by the organic excitations, it seeks to gratify its momentary appetites, on the spot, at the cost of well-being, it injures an organ by favouring the need of another, and it neglects to take into consideration circumstances of the external world which must be dealt with in the interest of the whole organism. Let me give some quite simple illustrations. A man is swimming under water. His cells know nothing of it, and do not trouble themselves about it. They quietly absorb from the blood the oxygen which they need at the moment, and set free, in exchange, carbonic dioxide. The decomposed blood excites the medulla oblongata, and the latter impetuously demands a movement of inspiration. Were the gray cerebral cortex to yield to the perfectly justifiable demand of one organ, and allow an impulse to inspire to proceed to the muscles concerned, the consequence would be the filling of the lungs with water, and death of the entire organism in consequence. Hence consciousness does not obey the demand of the medulla oblongata, and, instead of sending motor impulses to the intercostal muscles and those of the diaphragm, communicates them to the muscles of the arms and legs; instead of breathing under water, the swimmer emerges at the surface. Another instance. A typhoid convalescent feels ragingly hungry. Were he to yield to this desire, he might give himself a momentary satisfaction, but twenty-four hours later he would probably die from perforation of the intestines. Hence his consciousness resists the desire of his organs for the benefit of the whole organism. The cases are, of course, generally much more complex. But it is always the task of consciousness to test the stimuli which it receives from the depths of the organs, to comprise in the motor images which they excite all its earlier experiences, its knowledge, the directions given by the external world, and to disregard the stimuli if the judgments opposed to them are more powerful than they.Even a perfectly healthy organism quickly goes to rack and ruin if the inhibitive activity of consciousness is not exercised, and if, through this want of exercise, its inhibitive strengthbecomes atrophied. Cæsarian madness[363]is nothing but the consequence of the systematic indulgence by consciousness of every demand of the organs. If, however, the organism is not perfectly healthy; if it is degenerate, its ruin is much more speedy and certain when it obeys the urging of its organs, for in such a case these organs are suffering from perversions; they exact satisfactions, not only pernicious in their remote consequences to the whole organism, but immediately so to the organs themselves.When, therefore, the ‘I’ is spoken of, which is to have the right to dispose of itself, only the conscious ‘Ego’ can be meant, the pondering, remembering, observing, comparing intellect, not, however, the sub-’Egos’—unconnected, and for the most part at strife with each other—which are included in subconsciousness.[364]The individual is the judging, not the instinctive, human being. Liberty is the capacity of consciousness to derive excitations, not only from the stimuli of the organs, but from those of the senses, and from original memory-images. Ibsen’s liberty is the most abject, and always suicidal,[365]slavery. It is the subjugation of judgment to instinct, and the revolt of some single organ against the domination of that power, which has to watch over the well-being of the whole organism. Even so individualistic a philosopher as Herbert Spencer[366]says: ‘To become fitted for the social state, it is necessary that the man ... should possess the energy capable of renouncing a small enjoyment of the moment, in order to obtain a greater one in the future.’ A healthy man in the full vigour of intellect cannot sacrifice his judgment. Thesacrifizio dell’ intellettois the only one he cannot afford. If law and custom impose upon him acts which he recognises as absurd because they defeat their end, not only will he have the right, but it will be his duty, to defend reason against nonsense, and knowledge against error.But his revolt will always be in the name of judgment, not in the name of instinct.All this philosophy of self-restraint can, it is true, be preached to healthy human beings only. It has no application to degenerates. Their defective brain and nervous system are not in a state to respond to its demands. The processes within their organs are morbidly intensified. Hence the latter send particularly powerful stimuli to consciousness. The sensory nerves conduct badly. The memory-images in the brain are faint. Perceptions of the external world, representations of anterior experiences, are, therefore, non-existent or too feeble to subdue the stimulus originating in the organs. Such persons can do nought else but follow their desires and impulsions. They are the ‘instinctivists’ and ‘impulsivists’ of mental therapeutics. To this species belong the Noras, Ellidas, Rebeccas, Stockmanns, Brands, etc. This company, being dangerous to themselves and to others, require to be put under the guardianship of rational men, or, better still, in lunatic asylums. Such must be the answer to those fools or charlatans who vaunt Ibsen’s figures as ‘free men’ and ‘strong personalities,’ and with the sweet-sounding tones of a Pied Piper’s air on ‘self-disposal,’ ‘moral independence,’ and ‘living life out,’ attract children devoid of judgment heaven knows whither, but in any case to their ruin.The third feature of Ibsen’s drama accounting for his success is the light in which he shows woman. ‘Women are the pillars of society,’ he makes Bernick say (inThe Pillars of Society, p. 114). With Ibsen woman has no duties and all rights. The tie of marriage does not bind her. She runs away when she longs for liberty, or when she believes she has cause of complaint against her husband, or when he pleases her a little less than another man. The man who plays the Joseph, and does not comply with the will of Madame Potiphar, does not draw on himself the customary ridicule; he is roundly pronounced a criminal (Ghosts, p. 158):
You were to set resolutely to work in the world—the living world of to-day, as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to home; to win over minds and wills; to create noble men around you in wider and wider circles. Noblemen.Rosmer.Joyful noblemen.Rebecca.Yes, joyful.Rosmer.For it is joy that ennobles the mind.It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer going ‘from home to home’ ‘in wider and wider circles,’ and making the persons before whom he talks into ‘joyful noblemen,’ while he ‘awakens’ them and ‘purifies their wills,’ and thus ‘creates a true democracy.’ This rigmarole is, it is true, incomprehensible; but, at all events, it must be something agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs ‘joy’ to create ‘noblemen.’ And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly discovers (p. 102): ‘The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.’ What! Rosmer kill happiness when he ‘goes from home to home,’ awakening, winning, making people free, etc., and creating joyful noblemen? The word ‘joyful’ includes, at least, something of happiness, and yet the education of men to ‘joyful noblemen’ is to kill happiness? Rosmer finds (p. 97) ‘the work of ennobling men’s minds is not for him. And, besides, it is so hopeless in itself.’ This is in a measure intelligible, though it is not stated from what experience Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite beyond comprehension is Rebecca’s speech about the fatal influence of ‘the Rosmer view of life.’ InGhosts, Mrs. Alving endeavours to explain her defunct husband’s vagaries in this balderdash (p. 187): ‘When he was a young lieutenant, he was brimming over with the joy of life. It was like a breezy day only to look at him. And what exuberant strength and vitality there was in him! And then, child of joy as he was—for hewaslike a child at the time—he had to live here at home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him, but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an office. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant, only loungers and boon companions.’ These antitheses seem to have something in them; but if we seriously set about hunting for a definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ‘Object in life—office’—‘work—business’—‘comrades—boon companions,’ are not in themselves oppositions, but become such through the individual. With a decent man they are perfectly coincident; with a base man they fall into opposition. A large or a smalltown has nothing to do with it. For Kant in the small town of Kœnigsberg, in the last century, the ‘office’ was ‘the object in life,’ ‘work’ was ‘business,’ and he so chose his ‘boon companions’ that they were at the same time his ‘comrades,’ as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other hand, there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle of men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could feel at ease and in inward harmony.InHedda Gablerwe find quite a multitude of such words, apparently saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ‘It was the passion for life in you!’ exclaims Lövborg to Hedda (p. 128), with the seeming conviction that he has, in this utterance, explained something to her. And Hedda says (p. 142): ‘Isee him before me. With vine-leaves in his hair. Hot and bold’ (p. 151). ‘And Ejlert Lövborg, he is sitting with vine-leaves in his hair, and reading aloud’ (p. 157). ‘Had he vine-leaves in his hair?’ (p. 171). ‘So that is how it all happened. Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair’ (p. 188).Hedda.Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully?Lövborg.Gracefully? With vine-leaves in my hair?‘With vine-leaves in his hair;’ ‘the passion for life’—these are words meaning, in the connection assigned to them, absolutely nothing, but giving scope for dreaming. In a few instances Ibsen employs these dreamily-nebulous, shadowy expressions with poetic licence,e.g., when we read inThe Pillars of Society(p. 19):Rörlund.Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me?Dina.Because you teach me so much that is beautiful.Rörlund.Beautiful? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful?Dina.Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing; but when I hear you speak, it makes me think of so much that is beautiful.Rörlund.What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing?Dina.I have never thought of that.Rörlund.Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful thing?Dina.A beautiful thing is something great and far away.Dina is a young girl living under sad and painful conditions. It is psychologically accurate that she should condense all her longing for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional colouring, such as ‘beautiful.’ It is the same with the dialogue between Gregers and Hedwig inThe Wild Duck(p. 53):Gregers.And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the sea.Hedwig.Why do you say ‘in the depths of the sea’?Gregers.What else could I say?Hedwig.You could say ‘the bottom of the sea’ [or ‘at the bottom of the water’].[348]Gregers.Oh, mayn’t I just as well say the depths of the sea?Hedwig.Yes; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak of the depths of the sea.Gregers.Why so?...Hedwig.... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that’s so stupid.... Because it’s only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty (Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is changing, and that she willingly plays with fire); hence it is natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams, and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting something far away and wild, such as ‘in the depths of the sea,’ with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous surging in her. But when expressions of this sort are used, not by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words ‘joy of life’ appear inGhosts(p. 176):Oswald.... She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).Mrs. Alving.What were you saying about the joy of life?Oswald.Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life?—always, always upon the joy of life? (p. 187).Mrs. Alving.You spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father.... He was brimming over with the joy of life.InHedda Gablerthe word ‘beauty’ plays a similar part (p. 190):Hedda(toLövborg).Youuse it [the pistol] now.... And do it beautifully (p. 214).Hedda.I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lövborg’s suicide] (p. 219).Hedda.A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of voluntary courage to take place in the world. Something over which there falls a veil of unintentional beauty.... And then now—the great act! That over which the sense of beauty falls!The ‘vine-leaves in the hair,’ in the same piece, belongs with equal exactness to this category of words, amounting to an obsession. The use of expressions full of mystery, incomprehensible to the hearer, and either freely coined by the speaker, or endowed by him with a peculiar sense, deviating from that usually assigned them in speech, is one of the most frequent phenomena among the mentally deranged. Griesinger[349]oftenlays stress on this, and A. Marie[350]adduces some characteristic examples of words and phrases, either newly invented or employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which have been repeated by the insane.Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a dweller on the borderland—a ‘mattoid.’ His use of formalized expressions does not therefore go so far as the invention of new words, as cited by Dr. Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious meaning to the expressions ‘beauty,’ ‘joy of life,’ ‘courage of life,’ etc., and one which they do not possess when rationally used, follows clearly enough from the examples quoted.Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense, corresponding to conversations held in dreams, and the silly rambling speech of persons suffering from fever or acute mania. InThe Lady from the Sea, Ellida says (p. 39): ‘The water in the fjord here is sick, ... yes, sick. And I believe it makes one sick, too’ (p. 79). ‘We’ (Ellida and the ‘stranger’) ‘spoke of the gulls and the eagles, and all the other sea-birds. I think—isn’t it wonderful?—when we talked of such things it seemed to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one with him.... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too’ (p. 100).I don’t think the dry land is really our home.... I think that if only men had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea, orinthe sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are—with better and happier....Arnholm(jestingly). Well, perhaps! But it can’t be helped. We’ve once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it’s too late to make good the mistake now.Ellida.Yes, you’ve spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as a secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause for the sadness of men.And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says (p. 129):And then she is so changeable, so capricious—she varies so suddenly.Arnholm.No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind.Wangel.Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That is the matter(!!).We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory, blurred, deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and the dream-like drivel, have essentially conduced to obtain for Ibsen his particular admirers. Over them hysterical mystics can dream, like Dina and Hedwig, over the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘in the depths of the sea.’ As they mean absolutely nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them whatever significance may be suggested by the play of association under the influence of momentary emotion. They are, moreover, exceedingly grateful material for the (so-called) ‘comprehensives,’ for whom nothing is ever obscure. ‘Comprehensives’ always explain everything. The greater the idiocy, the more involved, the richer in import, the more exhaustive is its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance with which these beings of ‘perfect comprehension’ look down upon the barbarian, who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian.In an exceedingly amusing French farce,Le Homard, a husband suddenly returning home one evening surprises a stranger with his wife. The latter does not lose her presence of mind, and says to the husband that, having suddenly been seized with illness, she had sent her maid for the first available doctor, and that this gentleman was the doctor. The husband thanks the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if he has already prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is not a doctor, tries to make himself scarce; but the anxious husband insists on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a glance at it; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ‘And will the chemist be able to read that?’ asks the husband, shaking his head. ‘As if it were print,’ asseverates the false physician, again trying to make his escape. The husband, however, adjures him to remain, and holds him fast until the maid returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she makes her appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe. No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and some powders. ‘Did the chemist give you those?’ demands the Galen in bewilderment. ‘Certainly.’ ‘On my prescription?’ ‘Of course it was on your prescription,’ replies the astonished maid. ‘Has the chemist made some mistake?’ interposes the troubled husband. ‘No, no,’ our Galen hastens to reply; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time, and becomes lost in reverie.These ‘comprehensives’ are like the chemist inLe Homard. They read with fluency all Ibsen’s prescriptions, and especially those containing absolutely no written characters, but simply crow’s feet devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to supply critical pills and electuaries when a piece of paper is brought to them bearing the signature of a self-styled doctor,and they dispense them without wincing, be there anything of any sort, or even nothing, on the slip of paper. Is it not significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the French mystic De Vogué, one of these ‘comprehensives,’ finds to praise is one of the meaningless phrases above cited?[351]A final stigma of Ibsen’s mysticism must be considered—his symbolism. InThe Wild Duck, this bird is the symbol of Hjalmar’s destiny, and the garret next the photographic studio a symbol of the ‘living lie,’ of which, according to Relling, everyone stands in need. InThe Lady from the Sea, Lyngstrand wishes to make a group which shall be the symbol of Ellida, as the ‘stranger’ with the changing eyes of a fish is of the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ‘stranger’ is really the symbol of a symbol. InGhosts, the burning of the asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving’s ‘living lie,’ and the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole piece the symbol of the depressed and sullen frame of mind of the personages in action. Ibsen’s earlier pieces,Emperor and Galilean,Brand,Peer Gynt, literally swarm with symbols. A mysterious collateral significance is given to every figure and every stage accessory, and every word includes a double meaning. From the ‘Psychology of Mysticism’ we already know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus of the wholly unconnected representations springing up in consciousness through the play of automatic association, that it attributes hidden but essential reference to each other in these representations. The ‘comprehensives’ believe they have said all when, with an extremely consequential and self-satisfied air, they demonstrate that the ‘stranger’ inThe Lady from the Seasignifies the sea, and the sea freedom. They quite overlook the fact that the thing to be explained is not what the poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in particular, why he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all. In the well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet calls ‘a cat a cat.’ That to express so sober an idea as that persons of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep longing for a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should have the whim to invent a ‘stranger with fish-like eyes,’ presupposesa diseased mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency to allegory and symbolism is very common. ‘Intricate arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic gestures and attitudes, strange interpretations of natural events, punning, word-coining, and peculiar modes of expression, frequently occurring in paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque colouring.’ Thus writes Tanzi,[352]and in the symbolism of the insane he saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism. Among men low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in fact, the habitual form of thought. We know the reason—their brain is not yet trained to attention; it is too weak to suppress irrational associations, and refers all that shoots through its consciousness to some chance phenomenon either just perceived, or else remembered.After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we have become acquainted—his theological obsessions of original sin, of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his symbolism—he might be numbered among the mystic degenerates with which I have concerned myself in the previous chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his place among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic than his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of anarchism. He is in a state of constant revolt against all that exists. He never exercises rational criticism with regard to this; he never shows what is bad, why it is bad, and how it could be made better. No; he only reproaches it with its existence, and has only one longing—to destroy it. ‘The ruin of everything’ was the programme of certain destructives in 1848, and has remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem,To my Friend the Destructive Orator. In this he glorifies the deluge as the ‘sole revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler’ (Halohedsfusker); but even it was not radically ruinous enough. ‘We want to make it still more radical, but for that end we need men and orators. You charge yourselves with flooding the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully a torpedo under the ark.’[353]In a series of letters offered by elephant-driver Brandesfor the edification of the adorers of Ibsen, the poet gives conspicuous specimens of his theories.[354]The state must be destroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for freedom has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its own end. As soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and cease to fight for it, we prove it to be lost to us. The meritorious thing in the fight for liberty is the state of permanent revolt against all existing things which it presupposes. There is nothing fixed and permanent. ‘Who warrants me that in the planet Jupiter twice two are not five?’ (This remark is an unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt,[355]which in recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true marriage. Friends are a costly luxury. ‘They have long hindered me from being myself.’ The care of the ‘I’ is the sole task of man. He ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it by any law or any consideration.These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also puts into the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already cited some of Mrs. Alving’s and Nora’s ego-maniacal and anarchical phrases. InThe Pillars of Society, Dina says (p. 19): ‘If only the people I lived amongst weren’t so proper and moral. Every day Hilda and Netta come here that I may take example by them. I can never be as well behaved as they are, and Iwon’t be’ (p. 44).But I wanted to know, too, if people over there [in America] are very—very moral ... if they are so—so proper and well-behaved as here.Johan.Well, at any rate, they’re not so bad as people here think.Dina.You don’t understand me. What I want is just that they should not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness.Martha Bernick.Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and convention! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and-wont!InAn Enemy of the People(p. 278) Stockmann declares: ‘I detest leading men ... they stand in the path of a free man wherever he turns—and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other noxious animals.’ (p. 280) ‘The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are thecompact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal majority—they it is.... The majority is never right.... The minority is always right.’ Where Ibsen does not seriously attack the majority he derides it—e.g., when he entrusts the maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. InAn Enemy of the People(p. 238):Burgomaster.You want to fly in the face of your superiors; and that’s an old habit of yours. You can’t endure any authority over youInRosmersholm(p. 53):Mortensgaard[the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer—I almost might say too many. What the party requires is a Christian element—something that everyone must respect. That’s what we’re sadly in need of.With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always personifies the sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees only. InGhoststhe blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches (p. 142): ‘What right have we human beings to happiness? No, we have to do our duty! And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you are bound by a holy tie.’ InThe Pillars of Societyit is the rogue Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordination of the individual to the community (p. 58): ‘People must learn to moderate their personal claims if they are to fulfil their duties in the community in which they are placed.’ InAn Enemy of the Peoplethe not less pitiable burgomaster sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this fashion (p. 209): ‘Anyhow, you’ve an ingrained propensity for going your own way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole community.’The trick is evident: to make the conception of the necessary subordination of the individual ridiculous and contemptible, Ibsen appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible beings. On the other hand, it is the characters on whom he lavishes all the wealth of his affection to whom he entrusts the duty of defending rebellion against duty, the aspersion or derision of laws, morals, institutions, self-discipline, and the proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the sole guide of life.The psychological roots of Ibsen’s anti-social impulses are well known. They are the degenerate’s incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resulting discomfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate himself. ‘The criminal,’ Lombroso[356]says, ‘in consequence of his neurotic and impulsive nature, and his hatred of the institutions which have punished or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, who finds in insurrection the means not only of satisfying his passions, but of even having them countenanced for the first time by a numerous public.’ This utterance is exactly applicable to Ibsen, with the slight change, that he is merely a theoretic criminal, his motor centres not being powerful enough to transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into deeds, and that he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses not in the insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition.His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an anarchist, but also a misanthrope, and fills him with a profound weariness of life. The doctrine ofAn Enemy of the Peopleis contained in Stockmann’s exclamation (p. 315): ‘The strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone’; and inRosmersholm(p. 24), Brendel says: ‘I like to take my pleasures in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.’ The same Brendel subsequently laments (p. 105): ‘I am going homewards; I am home-sick for the mighty Void.... Peter Mortensgaard never wills more than he can do. Peter Mortensgaard is capable of living his life without ideals. And that, do you see, that is just the mighty secret of action and of victory. It is the sum of the whole world’s wisdom.... The dark night is best. Peace be with you!’ Brendel’s words have a peculiar significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,[357]Ibsen wished to portray himself in that personage. That which is expressed in these passages is thedégoût des gensand thetedium vitæof alienists, phenomena never absent in depressed forms of mental alienation.In addition to his mysticism and ego-mania, Ibsen’s extraordinary poverty of ideas indicates another stigma of degeneracy. Superficial or ignorant judges, who appraise an artist’s intellectual wealth by the number of volumes he has produced, believe that when they point at the high pile of a degenerate’s works they have victoriously refuted the accusation of his infecundity. The well-informed are of course not entrapped by this paltry method of proof. The history of insane literature knows of a large number of cases in which fools have written and published dozens of thick volumes. For tens of years and in feverish haste they must have driven the pen, almost continuously, night and day; but since allthese bulky tomes contain not a single idea of any utility, this restless activity is not to be termed fruitful, in spite of the abundant typographical results. We have seen that Richard Wagner never invented a tale, a figure, a situation; but that he sponged on ancient poems or the Bible. Ibsen has almost as little genuine original creative power as his intellectual relative, and as he, in his beggar’s pride, disdains for the most part to borrow from other poets of procreative capacity, or from popular traditions exuberant with life, his poems reveal, when closely and keenly examined, an even greater poverty than those of Wagner. If we do not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the art of variation in a contrapuntist extraordinarily clever in dramatic technique, and follow the themes he so adroitly elaborates, we at once recognise their dreary monotony.At the central point of all his pieces (with the exception of those of a romantic character, written by him in his first period of pure imitation) stand two figures, always the same and fundamentally one, but having now a negative and now a positive sign, a thesis and antithesis in the Hegelian sense. They are, on the one hand, the human being who obeys his inner law only (that is, his ego-mania), and dauntlessly and defiantly makes a parade of it; and, on the other, the individual who, it is true, really acts in obedience to his ego-mania only, but has not the courage to display it, feigning respect for the law of others and for the notions of the majority—in other words, the avowed and violent anarchist, and his opposite, the crafty and timorously deceitful anarchist.The avowed ego-maniac is, with one single exception, always embodied in a woman. The exception is Brand. On the contrary, the hypocrite is always a man—again with a single exception, viz., that of Hedda Gabler, who does not personify the idea in its purity, frank anarchism in her nature being mingled with something of hypocrisy. Nora (A Doll’s House), Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Selma Malsberg (The League of the Young), Dina, Martha Hessel, Mrs. Bernick (The Pillars of Society), Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca (Rosmersholm), are one and the same figure, but seen, as it were, at different hours of the day, and consequently in different lights. Some are in the major, others in the minor, key; some are more, others less hysterically deranged; but essentially they are not only similar, but identical. Selma Malsberg (p. 60) cries: ‘Bear our unhappiness in common? Am I yet good enough? No. I can no longer keep silent, be a hypocrite and a liar. Now you shall know.... O, how you have wronged me! Infamously, all of you!... How I have thirsted for a drop of your care! But when I begged for ityou repulsed me with a polite joke. You dressed me like a doll. You played with me as with a child.... I want to go away from you.... Let me, let me.’ And Nora (p. 110): ‘I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald.... You and your father have sinned greatly against me. It is the fault of you two that nothing has been made of me. I was never happy, only merry.... Our house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa’s doll-child.... That is why I am going away from you now.... I shall now leave your house at once.’ Ellida (The Lady from the Sea): ‘What I want is that we should, of our own free will, release each other.... I am not what you took me for. Now you see it yourself. Now we can separate as friends, and freely.... Here there is no single thing that attracts me and binds me. I am so absolutely rootless in your house, Wangel.’ Selma threatens to leave, Ellida resolves to leave, Nora does leave, Mrs. Alving did leave. (Ghosts, p. 144) Pastor Manders: ‘All your efforts have been bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You have never been willing to endure any bond. Everything that has weighed upon you in life you have cast away without care or conscience, like a burden you could throw off at will. It did not please you to be a wife any longer, and you left your husband. You found it troublesome to be a mother, and you sent your child forth among strangers.’ Mrs. Bernick was, equally with her double, Mrs. Alving, a stranger in her own house. She, however, does not wish to leave, but to remain and endeavour to win over her husband (p. 112): ‘For many years I believed that you had once been mine, and I had lost you again. Now I know that you never were mine; but I shall win you.’ Dina (The Pillars of Society) cannot leave because she is not yet married, but as becomes her state of maidenhood, she gives her rebellious thoughts this form (p. 93): ‘I will be your wife; but first I will work, and become something for myself, just as you are. I will give myself; I will not be taken.’ Rebecca (Rosmersholm) is also unmarried, yet she runs away (p. 96):I am going.Rosmer.Where are you going, Rebecca?Rebecca.North, by the steamer. It was there I came from.Rosmer.But you have no ties there now.Rebecca.I have none here either.Rosmer.What do you think of doing?Rebecca.I don’t know. I only want to have done with it all.Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies his ego-mania without giving offence to society. This personage presents himself under the names successively ofTorvald Helmer, Consul Bernick, Curate Rörlund, Rector Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster Stockmann, Werle, and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler, always with the same ideas and the same words. InA Doll’s House(p. 104,et seq.), after his wife’s confession, Helmer cries: ‘Oh, what an awful awakening!... No religion, no morality, no sense of duty.... He can publish the whole story; and if he does publish it, perhaps I should be suspected of having been a party to your criminal transactions.... I must try to pacify him in one way or the other. The story must be kept secret, cost what it may.’ InGhostsPastor Manders on different occasions expresses himself thus: ‘One is certainly not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and thinks within one’s own four walls.... We must not expose ourselves to false interpretations, and we have no right whatever to give offence to our neighbours.... You go and risk your good name and reputation, and nearly succeed in ruining other people’s reputation into the bargain. It was unspeakably reckless of you to seek refuge with me.... Yes, that is the only thing possible’ (to ‘hush the matter up’) ‘... yes, family life is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such a case as you point to’ (an incestuous union), ‘one can never know.’ Rörlund (The Pillars of Society): ‘See how the family is undermined over there! how a brazen spirit of destruction is attacking the most vital truths!... Of course, a tare now and then springs up among the wheat, alas! but we honestly do our best to weed it out.... Oh, Dina, you can form no conception of the thousand considerations! When a man is placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why—he cannot be too careful.... Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me! Hush! someone is coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the others.... A good book forms a refreshing contrast to what we unhappily see every day in newspapers and magazines.’ Consul Bernick, in the same piece: ‘Just at this time, when I depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press and in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all over the country-side.... These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping at us.... I whose mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t do for me to have my name bespattered in this way.... I must keep my conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression on both the press and the public at large when they see that I set aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its course.’ Kroll, inRosmersholm: ‘Do you ever see the Radical papers?... But you’ve seen, then, I suppose, how these gentlemen of “the people” have been pleased to treat me?what infamous abuse they’ve dared to heap upon me?’ Werle, inThe Wild Duck: ‘Even if, out of attachment to me, she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that——?’ The Burgomaster, inAn Enemy of the People: ‘If, perhaps, I do watch over my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the good of the town.... Your statement ... must be kept back for the good of all ... we will do the best we can quietly; but nothing whatever, not a single word, of this unfortunate business must be made public.... And then you have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every possible and impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an idea than you must write at once some newspaper article or a whole pamphlet about it.’ Finally, Hedda Gabler: ‘And so you went off perfectly openly?... But what do you suppose that people will say about you, then?... I so dread a scandal! You should accept for your own sake, or, better still, for the world’s sake.’If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are read successively, an impression must be formed that they are part of the samerôle; and this impression is correct, for under all the different names there is only onerôle. The same is true of the women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora, unselfishly sacrifice themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel, Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are always the same figure in different guises. The monotony, moreover, extends to minutest details. Rank’s inherited disease is in Oswald’s case only carried further. Nora’s flight is repeated in almost every piece, and inThe Wild Duckis travestied in Hjalmar’s departure from his house. One feature of this scene appears word for word in all theréchauffésof it:Nora.Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage everything in the house far better than I do.Ellida.If I do go ... I haven’t a key to give up, an order to give.... I am absolutely rootless in your house, etc.InA Doll’s House, the heroine, who has settled her account with life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe, makes Rank play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she dances to it. InHedda Gabler, the heroine is heard ‘suddenly playing a wild dance’ before she shoots herself. Rosmer says to Rebecca, when the latter makes known her wish to die: ‘No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do whatshedared.’ The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to commit suicide: ‘Oh, you don’t frighten me! An elegant spoilt lady like you.... People don’t do things of that sort.’ Brack says, in response to Hedda Gabler’s outburst: ‘Rather die! That’s what people say, but nobody does it!’ In muchthe same words Helmer reproaches his wife Nora with having sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor Manders upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick, and Rebecca from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle’s crime was the seduction of the maidservant Gina. Alving’s crime was the seduction of his own maidservant. This pitiable and imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this impotence of his indolent brain to wash out the imprint of an idea once painfully elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of names for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under the influence of a reminiscence. InA Doll’s Housewe have Helmer; inThe Wild Duck, Hjalmar; inThe Pillars of Society, Hilmar, Mrs. Bernick’s brother.Thus Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees, at each shaking of the cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this toy. But adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always the same, inserted haphazard, and united into symmetrical figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not only to Ibsen’s plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for thirty years he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic patterns, these are his obsessions. These have existed in his own diseased mind, and have not sprung from observation of the world’s drama. The pretended ‘realist’ knows nothing of real life. He does not comprehend it; he does not even see it, and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions, ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manufacturing cannon is to take a tube and pour molten metal round it. Ibsen proceeds in a similar way with his poems. He has a thesis—more accurately, some anarchistic folly; this is the tube. It is now only a question of enveloping this tube with the metal of life’s realities. But that lies beyond Ibsen’s power. At best he occasionally finds some bits of worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box, by rummaging among dust-heaps; but this small quantity of metal does not suffice for a cannon. Where Ibsen makes strenuous efforts to produce a picture of actual contemporaneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his experience.Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this. It sinks below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber and Sir John Lubbock have recorded incidents of this sortin their observations of colonies of ants. The small features pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole life have never formed a clearer thought than: ‘How can I get hold of a bottle of brandy?’ or ‘How can I make myself interesting to men?’ The sole characteristic distinguishing these Lövborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas, do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to require strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the obtaining of a position in a bank (A Doll’s House); their catastrophes, that one no longer believes in the articles of their creed (Rosmersholm); the loss of an appointment as physician at a watering-place (An Enemy of the People); the raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnalpéché de jeunesse(The Pillars of Society); the frightful crimes darkening, like a thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their social circle are an intrigue with a maidservant (Ghosts,The Wild Duck); aliaisonwith an itinerant music-hall singer (An Enemy of the People); the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (The Wild Duck); the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good dinner (Hedda Gabler). It sometimes happens to me to pass a half-hour in the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter and play of the little ones. One day the children by accident saw the arrest of someone in the street. Although their attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant spectacle, they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found them full of the great event, and I became the auditor of the following dialogue:Matilda(aged three years). Why did they put the gentleman in prison?Richard(five years old, very dignified and sententious). It wasn’t a gentleman; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was wicked.Matilda.What had he done then?Richard(after reflecting a little). His mamma had said he wasn’t to take chocolate; but he did take chocolate. That’s why his mamma had him put in prison.This childish conversation always came into my mind when I lighted, in Ibsen’s plays, upon one of his crimes treated with such overawing importance.We have now made the complete tour of Ibsen. At the risk of being prolix and tedious, I have made copious quotations from his writings, in order that the reader might himself see the matter from which I have formed my judgments.Ibsen stands before us as a mystic and an ego-maniac, who would willingly prove the world and mankind not worth powder and shot, but who only proves that he has not the faintest inkling of one or the other. Incapable of adapting himself to any state of things whatsoever, he first abuses the state of things in Norway, then that of Europe generally. In no one of his productions is a single thought to be met with belonging to, or having an active influence on, the present age, unless we bestow this honour on his anarchism, which is explained by the diseased constitution of his mind, and his travesties of the least certain results of investigations in hypnotism and telepathy. He is a skilful dramatic technician, and knows how to represent with great poetic power personages in the background, and situations out of the chief current of the piece. This, however, is all that a conscientious and lucid analysis can really find in him. He has dared to speak of his ‘moral ideas,’ and his admirers glibly repeat the expression. Ibsen’s moral ideas! Any reader of the Ibsen drama, who finds inthemno food for laughter, has truly no sense of humour. He seems to preach apostacy, yet cannot free himself from the religious ideas of confession, original sin, and the Saviour’s act of redemption. He sets up egoism and the freedom of the individual from all scruples as an ideal, yet hardly has anyone acted somewhat unscrupulously, but he begins to whimper contritely, and continues until his heart, full to suffocation, has poured itself out in confession; while the only persons with whom he succeeds are women, who sacrifice their individuality to the point of annihilation for the sake of others. He extols every offence against morality as heroism, while he punishes, with nothing less than death, the smallest and stupidest love affair. He uses the words freedom, progress, etc., as a gargle, and in his best works honours lying and stagnation. And all these contradictions appear forsooth not successively as stations on the road of his development, but at one and the same time, and side by side. His French admirer, Ehrhard,[358]sees this disconcerting fact, and endeavours as best he can to excuse it. His Norwegian interpreter, Henrik Jaeger, on the contrary, asserts with the utmost placidity[359]that the most prominent characteristic of Ibsen’s works is their unity(Enhed). The Frenchman and the Norwegian were most incautious in not preconcerting, prior to praising their great man in manners so divergent. The single discoverable unity in Ibsen is his faculty of distortion. The point in which he always resembles himself is his entire incapacity to elaborate a single clear thought, to comprehend a single one of the watchwords daubed here and there on to his works, or to deduce the true conclusions from a single one of his premises.And this malignant, anti-social simpleton, highly gifted, it must be admitted, in the technique of the stage, they have had the audacity to try to raise upon the shield as the great world-poet of the closing century. His partizans have continued to shout, ‘Ibsen is a great poet!’ until all stronger judgments have become at least hesitating, and feebler ones wholly subjugated. In a recent book on Simon Magus,[360]there occurs this pretty story: ‘Apsethus, the Libyan, wished to become a god. In spite, however, of his most strenuous efforts he could not succeed in satisfying his longing. But, at any rate, he would make the people believe that he had become a god. He therefore collected a large number of parrots, in which Libya abounds, and shut them all in a cage. He kept them so for some time, and taught them to say, “Apsethus is a god.” When the birds had learnt this, he opened the cage and set them free. And the birds spread themselves throughout Libya, so that the words penetrated to the Greek settlements. And the Libyans, astonished at the voice of the birds, and not suspecting the trick Apsethus had played, looked upon him as a god.’ In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, Ibsen has taught a few ‘comprehensives’—the Brandes, Ehrhards, Jaegers, etc.—the words: ‘Ibsen is a modern! Ibsen is a poet of the future!’ and the parrots have spread over all the lands, and are chattering with deafening din in books and papers, ‘Ibsen is great! Ibsen is a modern spirit!’ and imbeciles among the public murmur the cry after them, because they hear it frequently repeated, and because, on such as they, every word uttered with emphasis and assurance makes an impression.It would certainly be a proof of superficiality to believe that the audacity of his Corybantes alone explains the high place to which Ibsen has been fraudulently elevated. Without question he possesses characteristics by which he could not but act upon his contemporaries.Firstly, we have his vague phrases and indefinite incidental hints concerning ‘the great epoch in which we live,’ ‘the new era about to dawn,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘progress,’ etc. These phrases were bound to please all dreamers and drivellers, for theygive free scope to any interpretation, and, in particular, allow the presumption that their author is possessed of modernity and a bold spirit of progress. They are not discouraged by the fact that Ibsen himself makes cruel sport of these ‘comprehensives,’ when, inThe Wild Duck, he makes Relling (p. 361) use the word ‘demoniac,’ while admitting it to be wholly meaningless, just as the poet himself employs his own bunkum about progress and freedom. They are ‘comprehensives’ precisely because they interpret every passage according to their own sweet will.Then there is Ibsen’s doctrine of the right of the individual to live in accordance with his own law. Is this really his doctrine? This must be denied when, after struggling through his countless contradictions and self-refutations, we see that he treats with peculiar affection the sacrificial lambs, who are all negation of their own ‘I,’ all suppression of their most natural impulses, all neighbourly love and consideration for others. In any case, his apostles have brought forward anarchistic individualism as the central doctrine of his drama. Ehrhard[361]sums up this doctrine in these words: ‘The revolt of the individual against society. In other words, Ibsen is the apostle of moral autonomy (autonomie morale).’ Now such a doctrine is surely well fitted to cause ravages among the intellectually indolent or intellectually incapable.Ehrhard dares to use the expression ‘moral autonomy.’ In the name of this fine principle Ibsen’s critical heralds persuade the youth who gather round him that they have the right to ‘live out their lives,’ and they smile approvingly when their auditors understand by this term the right to yield to their basest instincts and to free themselves from all discipline. As the scoundrels in Mediterranean ports do with well-dressed travellers, they whisper in the ear of their public, ‘Amuse yourselves! Enjoy yourselves! Come with me; I will show you the way!’ But to confound ‘moral autonomy’ with absence of restraint is, on the part of their faith, a monstrous error, and in the corrupters of youth, hoping for the pay of procuration, an infamous deception.These two notions are not only not synonymous, they are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Liberty of the individual! The right to autonomy! The Ego its own legislator! Who is this ‘I’ that is to make laws for itself? Who is this ‘Self’ for whom Ibsen demands the right of autonomy? Who is this free individual? That the entire notion of a Self opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and exclusive is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen in the chapter on the ‘Psychology of Ego-mania,’ and I neednot, therefore, dwell again on the subject in this place. We know that man, like every other complex and highly developed living being, is a society or state, of simpler, and of simplest, living beings, of cells and cell-systems, or organs, all having their own functions and wants. In the course of the development of life on earth they have become associated, and have undergone changes, in order to be able to perform higher functions than are possible to the simple cell and primitive agglomeration of cells. The highest function of life yet known to us is clear consciousness; the most elevated content of consciousness is knowledge; and the most obvious and immediate aim of knowledge is constantly to procure better conditions of life for the organism, hence to preserve its existence as long as possible, and to fill it with the greatest possible number of pleasurable sensations. In order that the collective organism may be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound to submit to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its interior is disease, and leads rapidly to death. The single cell executes its chemical work of decomposition and of integration without troubling itself about aught else. It labours almost for itself alone. Its consciousness is the most limited conceivable; it has hardly any prevision; its own power of adaptation is so minute that if a cell is in the smallest degree less well nourished than its neighbour, it cannot hold its ground against the latter, and is immediately devoured by it.[362]The differentiated cell-group, or organ, already possesses a wider consciousness, whose seat is its own nerve-ganglia; its function is more complex, and no longer operates wholly, or even chiefly, for its own benefit, but for that of the collective organism; it also has already, I might say, a constitutional influence on the direction of the affairs of the whole organism, asserting itself in the power of the organ to suggest to consciousness presentations prompting the will to acts. The most exalted organ, however, the condensation of all the other organs, is the gray cerebral cortex. It is the seat of clear consciousness. It works least of all for itself, most of all for the commonwealth—i.e., for the whole organism. It is the government of the State. To it come all reports from the interior as well as the exterior; it has to find its way in the midst of all complications; it has to exercise foresight, and to take into consideration not only the immediate effect of an act,but also the more remote consequences for the commonwealth. When, therefore, it is a question of the ‘I,’ the ‘Self,’ the ‘Individual,’ it cannot be any subordinate part of the organism which is meant, such as the little toe or the rectum, but only the gray cerebral cortex. To it certainly belongs the right and duty of directing the individual and of prescribing its law. It is consciousness itself. But how does consciousness form its judgments and its decisions? It forms them from representations awakened in it by excitations proceeding from the internal organs and from the senses. If consciousness allows itself to be directed solely by the organic excitations, it seeks to gratify its momentary appetites, on the spot, at the cost of well-being, it injures an organ by favouring the need of another, and it neglects to take into consideration circumstances of the external world which must be dealt with in the interest of the whole organism. Let me give some quite simple illustrations. A man is swimming under water. His cells know nothing of it, and do not trouble themselves about it. They quietly absorb from the blood the oxygen which they need at the moment, and set free, in exchange, carbonic dioxide. The decomposed blood excites the medulla oblongata, and the latter impetuously demands a movement of inspiration. Were the gray cerebral cortex to yield to the perfectly justifiable demand of one organ, and allow an impulse to inspire to proceed to the muscles concerned, the consequence would be the filling of the lungs with water, and death of the entire organism in consequence. Hence consciousness does not obey the demand of the medulla oblongata, and, instead of sending motor impulses to the intercostal muscles and those of the diaphragm, communicates them to the muscles of the arms and legs; instead of breathing under water, the swimmer emerges at the surface. Another instance. A typhoid convalescent feels ragingly hungry. Were he to yield to this desire, he might give himself a momentary satisfaction, but twenty-four hours later he would probably die from perforation of the intestines. Hence his consciousness resists the desire of his organs for the benefit of the whole organism. The cases are, of course, generally much more complex. But it is always the task of consciousness to test the stimuli which it receives from the depths of the organs, to comprise in the motor images which they excite all its earlier experiences, its knowledge, the directions given by the external world, and to disregard the stimuli if the judgments opposed to them are more powerful than they.Even a perfectly healthy organism quickly goes to rack and ruin if the inhibitive activity of consciousness is not exercised, and if, through this want of exercise, its inhibitive strengthbecomes atrophied. Cæsarian madness[363]is nothing but the consequence of the systematic indulgence by consciousness of every demand of the organs. If, however, the organism is not perfectly healthy; if it is degenerate, its ruin is much more speedy and certain when it obeys the urging of its organs, for in such a case these organs are suffering from perversions; they exact satisfactions, not only pernicious in their remote consequences to the whole organism, but immediately so to the organs themselves.When, therefore, the ‘I’ is spoken of, which is to have the right to dispose of itself, only the conscious ‘Ego’ can be meant, the pondering, remembering, observing, comparing intellect, not, however, the sub-’Egos’—unconnected, and for the most part at strife with each other—which are included in subconsciousness.[364]The individual is the judging, not the instinctive, human being. Liberty is the capacity of consciousness to derive excitations, not only from the stimuli of the organs, but from those of the senses, and from original memory-images. Ibsen’s liberty is the most abject, and always suicidal,[365]slavery. It is the subjugation of judgment to instinct, and the revolt of some single organ against the domination of that power, which has to watch over the well-being of the whole organism. Even so individualistic a philosopher as Herbert Spencer[366]says: ‘To become fitted for the social state, it is necessary that the man ... should possess the energy capable of renouncing a small enjoyment of the moment, in order to obtain a greater one in the future.’ A healthy man in the full vigour of intellect cannot sacrifice his judgment. Thesacrifizio dell’ intellettois the only one he cannot afford. If law and custom impose upon him acts which he recognises as absurd because they defeat their end, not only will he have the right, but it will be his duty, to defend reason against nonsense, and knowledge against error.But his revolt will always be in the name of judgment, not in the name of instinct.All this philosophy of self-restraint can, it is true, be preached to healthy human beings only. It has no application to degenerates. Their defective brain and nervous system are not in a state to respond to its demands. The processes within their organs are morbidly intensified. Hence the latter send particularly powerful stimuli to consciousness. The sensory nerves conduct badly. The memory-images in the brain are faint. Perceptions of the external world, representations of anterior experiences, are, therefore, non-existent or too feeble to subdue the stimulus originating in the organs. Such persons can do nought else but follow their desires and impulsions. They are the ‘instinctivists’ and ‘impulsivists’ of mental therapeutics. To this species belong the Noras, Ellidas, Rebeccas, Stockmanns, Brands, etc. This company, being dangerous to themselves and to others, require to be put under the guardianship of rational men, or, better still, in lunatic asylums. Such must be the answer to those fools or charlatans who vaunt Ibsen’s figures as ‘free men’ and ‘strong personalities,’ and with the sweet-sounding tones of a Pied Piper’s air on ‘self-disposal,’ ‘moral independence,’ and ‘living life out,’ attract children devoid of judgment heaven knows whither, but in any case to their ruin.The third feature of Ibsen’s drama accounting for his success is the light in which he shows woman. ‘Women are the pillars of society,’ he makes Bernick say (inThe Pillars of Society, p. 114). With Ibsen woman has no duties and all rights. The tie of marriage does not bind her. She runs away when she longs for liberty, or when she believes she has cause of complaint against her husband, or when he pleases her a little less than another man. The man who plays the Joseph, and does not comply with the will of Madame Potiphar, does not draw on himself the customary ridicule; he is roundly pronounced a criminal (Ghosts, p. 158):
You were to set resolutely to work in the world—the living world of to-day, as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to home; to win over minds and wills; to create noble men around you in wider and wider circles. Noblemen.Rosmer.Joyful noblemen.Rebecca.Yes, joyful.Rosmer.For it is joy that ennobles the mind.
You were to set resolutely to work in the world—the living world of to-day, as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to home; to win over minds and wills; to create noble men around you in wider and wider circles. Noblemen.
Rosmer.Joyful noblemen.
Rebecca.Yes, joyful.
Rosmer.For it is joy that ennobles the mind.
It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer going ‘from home to home’ ‘in wider and wider circles,’ and making the persons before whom he talks into ‘joyful noblemen,’ while he ‘awakens’ them and ‘purifies their wills,’ and thus ‘creates a true democracy.’ This rigmarole is, it is true, incomprehensible; but, at all events, it must be something agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs ‘joy’ to create ‘noblemen.’ And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly discovers (p. 102): ‘The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.’ What! Rosmer kill happiness when he ‘goes from home to home,’ awakening, winning, making people free, etc., and creating joyful noblemen? The word ‘joyful’ includes, at least, something of happiness, and yet the education of men to ‘joyful noblemen’ is to kill happiness? Rosmer finds (p. 97) ‘the work of ennobling men’s minds is not for him. And, besides, it is so hopeless in itself.’ This is in a measure intelligible, though it is not stated from what experience Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite beyond comprehension is Rebecca’s speech about the fatal influence of ‘the Rosmer view of life.’ InGhosts, Mrs. Alving endeavours to explain her defunct husband’s vagaries in this balderdash (p. 187): ‘When he was a young lieutenant, he was brimming over with the joy of life. It was like a breezy day only to look at him. And what exuberant strength and vitality there was in him! And then, child of joy as he was—for hewaslike a child at the time—he had to live here at home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him, but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an office. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant, only loungers and boon companions.’ These antitheses seem to have something in them; but if we seriously set about hunting for a definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ‘Object in life—office’—‘work—business’—‘comrades—boon companions,’ are not in themselves oppositions, but become such through the individual. With a decent man they are perfectly coincident; with a base man they fall into opposition. A large or a smalltown has nothing to do with it. For Kant in the small town of Kœnigsberg, in the last century, the ‘office’ was ‘the object in life,’ ‘work’ was ‘business,’ and he so chose his ‘boon companions’ that they were at the same time his ‘comrades,’ as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other hand, there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle of men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could feel at ease and in inward harmony.
InHedda Gablerwe find quite a multitude of such words, apparently saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ‘It was the passion for life in you!’ exclaims Lövborg to Hedda (p. 128), with the seeming conviction that he has, in this utterance, explained something to her. And Hedda says (p. 142): ‘Isee him before me. With vine-leaves in his hair. Hot and bold’ (p. 151). ‘And Ejlert Lövborg, he is sitting with vine-leaves in his hair, and reading aloud’ (p. 157). ‘Had he vine-leaves in his hair?’ (p. 171). ‘So that is how it all happened. Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair’ (p. 188).
Hedda.Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully?Lövborg.Gracefully? With vine-leaves in my hair?
Hedda.Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully?
Lövborg.Gracefully? With vine-leaves in my hair?
‘With vine-leaves in his hair;’ ‘the passion for life’—these are words meaning, in the connection assigned to them, absolutely nothing, but giving scope for dreaming. In a few instances Ibsen employs these dreamily-nebulous, shadowy expressions with poetic licence,e.g., when we read inThe Pillars of Society(p. 19):
Rörlund.Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me?Dina.Because you teach me so much that is beautiful.Rörlund.Beautiful? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful?Dina.Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing; but when I hear you speak, it makes me think of so much that is beautiful.Rörlund.What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing?Dina.I have never thought of that.Rörlund.Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful thing?Dina.A beautiful thing is something great and far away.
Rörlund.Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me?
Dina.Because you teach me so much that is beautiful.
Rörlund.Beautiful? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful?
Dina.Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing; but when I hear you speak, it makes me think of so much that is beautiful.
Rörlund.What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing?
Dina.I have never thought of that.
Rörlund.Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful thing?
Dina.A beautiful thing is something great and far away.
Dina is a young girl living under sad and painful conditions. It is psychologically accurate that she should condense all her longing for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional colouring, such as ‘beautiful.’ It is the same with the dialogue between Gregers and Hedwig inThe Wild Duck(p. 53):
Gregers.And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the sea.Hedwig.Why do you say ‘in the depths of the sea’?Gregers.What else could I say?Hedwig.You could say ‘the bottom of the sea’ [or ‘at the bottom of the water’].[348]Gregers.Oh, mayn’t I just as well say the depths of the sea?Hedwig.Yes; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak of the depths of the sea.Gregers.Why so?...Hedwig.... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that’s so stupid.... Because it’s only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].
Gregers.And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the sea.
Hedwig.Why do you say ‘in the depths of the sea’?
Gregers.What else could I say?
Hedwig.You could say ‘the bottom of the sea’ [or ‘at the bottom of the water’].[348]
Gregers.Oh, mayn’t I just as well say the depths of the sea?
Hedwig.Yes; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak of the depths of the sea.
Gregers.Why so?...
Hedwig.... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that’s so stupid.... Because it’s only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].
Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty (Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is changing, and that she willingly plays with fire); hence it is natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams, and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting something far away and wild, such as ‘in the depths of the sea,’ with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous surging in her. But when expressions of this sort are used, not by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.
These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words ‘joy of life’ appear inGhosts(p. 176):
Oswald.... She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).Mrs. Alving.What were you saying about the joy of life?Oswald.Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life?—always, always upon the joy of life? (p. 187).Mrs. Alving.You spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father.... He was brimming over with the joy of life.
Oswald.... She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).
Mrs. Alving.What were you saying about the joy of life?
Oswald.Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life?—always, always upon the joy of life? (p. 187).
Mrs. Alving.You spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father.... He was brimming over with the joy of life.
InHedda Gablerthe word ‘beauty’ plays a similar part (p. 190):
Hedda(toLövborg).Youuse it [the pistol] now.... And do it beautifully (p. 214).Hedda.I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lövborg’s suicide] (p. 219).Hedda.A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of voluntary courage to take place in the world. Something over which there falls a veil of unintentional beauty.... And then now—the great act! That over which the sense of beauty falls!
Hedda(toLövborg).Youuse it [the pistol] now.... And do it beautifully (p. 214).
Hedda.I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lövborg’s suicide] (p. 219).
Hedda.A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of voluntary courage to take place in the world. Something over which there falls a veil of unintentional beauty.... And then now—the great act! That over which the sense of beauty falls!
The ‘vine-leaves in the hair,’ in the same piece, belongs with equal exactness to this category of words, amounting to an obsession. The use of expressions full of mystery, incomprehensible to the hearer, and either freely coined by the speaker, or endowed by him with a peculiar sense, deviating from that usually assigned them in speech, is one of the most frequent phenomena among the mentally deranged. Griesinger[349]oftenlays stress on this, and A. Marie[350]adduces some characteristic examples of words and phrases, either newly invented or employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which have been repeated by the insane.
Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a dweller on the borderland—a ‘mattoid.’ His use of formalized expressions does not therefore go so far as the invention of new words, as cited by Dr. Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious meaning to the expressions ‘beauty,’ ‘joy of life,’ ‘courage of life,’ etc., and one which they do not possess when rationally used, follows clearly enough from the examples quoted.
Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense, corresponding to conversations held in dreams, and the silly rambling speech of persons suffering from fever or acute mania. InThe Lady from the Sea, Ellida says (p. 39): ‘The water in the fjord here is sick, ... yes, sick. And I believe it makes one sick, too’ (p. 79). ‘We’ (Ellida and the ‘stranger’) ‘spoke of the gulls and the eagles, and all the other sea-birds. I think—isn’t it wonderful?—when we talked of such things it seemed to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one with him.... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too’ (p. 100).
I don’t think the dry land is really our home.... I think that if only men had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea, orinthe sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are—with better and happier....Arnholm(jestingly). Well, perhaps! But it can’t be helped. We’ve once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it’s too late to make good the mistake now.Ellida.Yes, you’ve spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as a secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause for the sadness of men.
I don’t think the dry land is really our home.... I think that if only men had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea, orinthe sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are—with better and happier....
Arnholm(jestingly). Well, perhaps! But it can’t be helped. We’ve once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it’s too late to make good the mistake now.
Ellida.Yes, you’ve spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as a secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause for the sadness of men.
And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says (p. 129):
And then she is so changeable, so capricious—she varies so suddenly.Arnholm.No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind.Wangel.Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That is the matter(!!).
And then she is so changeable, so capricious—she varies so suddenly.
Arnholm.No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind.
Wangel.Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That is the matter(!!).
We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory, blurred, deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and the dream-like drivel, have essentially conduced to obtain for Ibsen his particular admirers. Over them hysterical mystics can dream, like Dina and Hedwig, over the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘in the depths of the sea.’ As they mean absolutely nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them whatever significance may be suggested by the play of association under the influence of momentary emotion. They are, moreover, exceedingly grateful material for the (so-called) ‘comprehensives,’ for whom nothing is ever obscure. ‘Comprehensives’ always explain everything. The greater the idiocy, the more involved, the richer in import, the more exhaustive is its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance with which these beings of ‘perfect comprehension’ look down upon the barbarian, who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian.
In an exceedingly amusing French farce,Le Homard, a husband suddenly returning home one evening surprises a stranger with his wife. The latter does not lose her presence of mind, and says to the husband that, having suddenly been seized with illness, she had sent her maid for the first available doctor, and that this gentleman was the doctor. The husband thanks the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if he has already prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is not a doctor, tries to make himself scarce; but the anxious husband insists on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a glance at it; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ‘And will the chemist be able to read that?’ asks the husband, shaking his head. ‘As if it were print,’ asseverates the false physician, again trying to make his escape. The husband, however, adjures him to remain, and holds him fast until the maid returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she makes her appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe. No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and some powders. ‘Did the chemist give you those?’ demands the Galen in bewilderment. ‘Certainly.’ ‘On my prescription?’ ‘Of course it was on your prescription,’ replies the astonished maid. ‘Has the chemist made some mistake?’ interposes the troubled husband. ‘No, no,’ our Galen hastens to reply; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time, and becomes lost in reverie.
These ‘comprehensives’ are like the chemist inLe Homard. They read with fluency all Ibsen’s prescriptions, and especially those containing absolutely no written characters, but simply crow’s feet devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to supply critical pills and electuaries when a piece of paper is brought to them bearing the signature of a self-styled doctor,and they dispense them without wincing, be there anything of any sort, or even nothing, on the slip of paper. Is it not significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the French mystic De Vogué, one of these ‘comprehensives,’ finds to praise is one of the meaningless phrases above cited?[351]
A final stigma of Ibsen’s mysticism must be considered—his symbolism. InThe Wild Duck, this bird is the symbol of Hjalmar’s destiny, and the garret next the photographic studio a symbol of the ‘living lie,’ of which, according to Relling, everyone stands in need. InThe Lady from the Sea, Lyngstrand wishes to make a group which shall be the symbol of Ellida, as the ‘stranger’ with the changing eyes of a fish is of the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ‘stranger’ is really the symbol of a symbol. InGhosts, the burning of the asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving’s ‘living lie,’ and the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole piece the symbol of the depressed and sullen frame of mind of the personages in action. Ibsen’s earlier pieces,Emperor and Galilean,Brand,Peer Gynt, literally swarm with symbols. A mysterious collateral significance is given to every figure and every stage accessory, and every word includes a double meaning. From the ‘Psychology of Mysticism’ we already know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus of the wholly unconnected representations springing up in consciousness through the play of automatic association, that it attributes hidden but essential reference to each other in these representations. The ‘comprehensives’ believe they have said all when, with an extremely consequential and self-satisfied air, they demonstrate that the ‘stranger’ inThe Lady from the Seasignifies the sea, and the sea freedom. They quite overlook the fact that the thing to be explained is not what the poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in particular, why he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all. In the well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet calls ‘a cat a cat.’ That to express so sober an idea as that persons of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep longing for a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should have the whim to invent a ‘stranger with fish-like eyes,’ presupposesa diseased mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency to allegory and symbolism is very common. ‘Intricate arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic gestures and attitudes, strange interpretations of natural events, punning, word-coining, and peculiar modes of expression, frequently occurring in paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque colouring.’ Thus writes Tanzi,[352]and in the symbolism of the insane he saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism. Among men low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in fact, the habitual form of thought. We know the reason—their brain is not yet trained to attention; it is too weak to suppress irrational associations, and refers all that shoots through its consciousness to some chance phenomenon either just perceived, or else remembered.
After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we have become acquainted—his theological obsessions of original sin, of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his symbolism—he might be numbered among the mystic degenerates with which I have concerned myself in the previous chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his place among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic than his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of anarchism. He is in a state of constant revolt against all that exists. He never exercises rational criticism with regard to this; he never shows what is bad, why it is bad, and how it could be made better. No; he only reproaches it with its existence, and has only one longing—to destroy it. ‘The ruin of everything’ was the programme of certain destructives in 1848, and has remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem,To my Friend the Destructive Orator. In this he glorifies the deluge as the ‘sole revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler’ (Halohedsfusker); but even it was not radically ruinous enough. ‘We want to make it still more radical, but for that end we need men and orators. You charge yourselves with flooding the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully a torpedo under the ark.’[353]In a series of letters offered by elephant-driver Brandesfor the edification of the adorers of Ibsen, the poet gives conspicuous specimens of his theories.[354]The state must be destroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for freedom has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its own end. As soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and cease to fight for it, we prove it to be lost to us. The meritorious thing in the fight for liberty is the state of permanent revolt against all existing things which it presupposes. There is nothing fixed and permanent. ‘Who warrants me that in the planet Jupiter twice two are not five?’ (This remark is an unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt,[355]which in recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true marriage. Friends are a costly luxury. ‘They have long hindered me from being myself.’ The care of the ‘I’ is the sole task of man. He ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it by any law or any consideration.
These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also puts into the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already cited some of Mrs. Alving’s and Nora’s ego-maniacal and anarchical phrases. InThe Pillars of Society, Dina says (p. 19): ‘If only the people I lived amongst weren’t so proper and moral. Every day Hilda and Netta come here that I may take example by them. I can never be as well behaved as they are, and Iwon’t be’ (p. 44).
But I wanted to know, too, if people over there [in America] are very—very moral ... if they are so—so proper and well-behaved as here.Johan.Well, at any rate, they’re not so bad as people here think.Dina.You don’t understand me. What I want is just that they should not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness.Martha Bernick.Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and convention! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and-wont!
But I wanted to know, too, if people over there [in America] are very—very moral ... if they are so—so proper and well-behaved as here.
Johan.Well, at any rate, they’re not so bad as people here think.
Dina.You don’t understand me. What I want is just that they should not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness.
Martha Bernick.Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and convention! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and-wont!
InAn Enemy of the People(p. 278) Stockmann declares: ‘I detest leading men ... they stand in the path of a free man wherever he turns—and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other noxious animals.’ (p. 280) ‘The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are thecompact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal majority—they it is.... The majority is never right.... The minority is always right.’ Where Ibsen does not seriously attack the majority he derides it—e.g., when he entrusts the maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. InAn Enemy of the People(p. 238):
Burgomaster.You want to fly in the face of your superiors; and that’s an old habit of yours. You can’t endure any authority over you
Burgomaster.You want to fly in the face of your superiors; and that’s an old habit of yours. You can’t endure any authority over you
InRosmersholm(p. 53):
Mortensgaard[the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer—I almost might say too many. What the party requires is a Christian element—something that everyone must respect. That’s what we’re sadly in need of.
Mortensgaard[the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer—I almost might say too many. What the party requires is a Christian element—something that everyone must respect. That’s what we’re sadly in need of.
With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always personifies the sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees only. InGhoststhe blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches (p. 142): ‘What right have we human beings to happiness? No, we have to do our duty! And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you are bound by a holy tie.’ InThe Pillars of Societyit is the rogue Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordination of the individual to the community (p. 58): ‘People must learn to moderate their personal claims if they are to fulfil their duties in the community in which they are placed.’ InAn Enemy of the Peoplethe not less pitiable burgomaster sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this fashion (p. 209): ‘Anyhow, you’ve an ingrained propensity for going your own way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole community.’
The trick is evident: to make the conception of the necessary subordination of the individual ridiculous and contemptible, Ibsen appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible beings. On the other hand, it is the characters on whom he lavishes all the wealth of his affection to whom he entrusts the duty of defending rebellion against duty, the aspersion or derision of laws, morals, institutions, self-discipline, and the proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the sole guide of life.
The psychological roots of Ibsen’s anti-social impulses are well known. They are the degenerate’s incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resulting discomfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate himself. ‘The criminal,’ Lombroso[356]says, ‘in consequence of his neurotic and impulsive nature, and his hatred of the institutions which have punished or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, who finds in insurrection the means not only of satisfying his passions, but of even having them countenanced for the first time by a numerous public.’ This utterance is exactly applicable to Ibsen, with the slight change, that he is merely a theoretic criminal, his motor centres not being powerful enough to transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into deeds, and that he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses not in the insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition.
His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an anarchist, but also a misanthrope, and fills him with a profound weariness of life. The doctrine ofAn Enemy of the Peopleis contained in Stockmann’s exclamation (p. 315): ‘The strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone’; and inRosmersholm(p. 24), Brendel says: ‘I like to take my pleasures in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.’ The same Brendel subsequently laments (p. 105): ‘I am going homewards; I am home-sick for the mighty Void.... Peter Mortensgaard never wills more than he can do. Peter Mortensgaard is capable of living his life without ideals. And that, do you see, that is just the mighty secret of action and of victory. It is the sum of the whole world’s wisdom.... The dark night is best. Peace be with you!’ Brendel’s words have a peculiar significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,[357]Ibsen wished to portray himself in that personage. That which is expressed in these passages is thedégoût des gensand thetedium vitæof alienists, phenomena never absent in depressed forms of mental alienation.
In addition to his mysticism and ego-mania, Ibsen’s extraordinary poverty of ideas indicates another stigma of degeneracy. Superficial or ignorant judges, who appraise an artist’s intellectual wealth by the number of volumes he has produced, believe that when they point at the high pile of a degenerate’s works they have victoriously refuted the accusation of his infecundity. The well-informed are of course not entrapped by this paltry method of proof. The history of insane literature knows of a large number of cases in which fools have written and published dozens of thick volumes. For tens of years and in feverish haste they must have driven the pen, almost continuously, night and day; but since allthese bulky tomes contain not a single idea of any utility, this restless activity is not to be termed fruitful, in spite of the abundant typographical results. We have seen that Richard Wagner never invented a tale, a figure, a situation; but that he sponged on ancient poems or the Bible. Ibsen has almost as little genuine original creative power as his intellectual relative, and as he, in his beggar’s pride, disdains for the most part to borrow from other poets of procreative capacity, or from popular traditions exuberant with life, his poems reveal, when closely and keenly examined, an even greater poverty than those of Wagner. If we do not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the art of variation in a contrapuntist extraordinarily clever in dramatic technique, and follow the themes he so adroitly elaborates, we at once recognise their dreary monotony.
At the central point of all his pieces (with the exception of those of a romantic character, written by him in his first period of pure imitation) stand two figures, always the same and fundamentally one, but having now a negative and now a positive sign, a thesis and antithesis in the Hegelian sense. They are, on the one hand, the human being who obeys his inner law only (that is, his ego-mania), and dauntlessly and defiantly makes a parade of it; and, on the other, the individual who, it is true, really acts in obedience to his ego-mania only, but has not the courage to display it, feigning respect for the law of others and for the notions of the majority—in other words, the avowed and violent anarchist, and his opposite, the crafty and timorously deceitful anarchist.
The avowed ego-maniac is, with one single exception, always embodied in a woman. The exception is Brand. On the contrary, the hypocrite is always a man—again with a single exception, viz., that of Hedda Gabler, who does not personify the idea in its purity, frank anarchism in her nature being mingled with something of hypocrisy. Nora (A Doll’s House), Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Selma Malsberg (The League of the Young), Dina, Martha Hessel, Mrs. Bernick (The Pillars of Society), Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca (Rosmersholm), are one and the same figure, but seen, as it were, at different hours of the day, and consequently in different lights. Some are in the major, others in the minor, key; some are more, others less hysterically deranged; but essentially they are not only similar, but identical. Selma Malsberg (p. 60) cries: ‘Bear our unhappiness in common? Am I yet good enough? No. I can no longer keep silent, be a hypocrite and a liar. Now you shall know.... O, how you have wronged me! Infamously, all of you!... How I have thirsted for a drop of your care! But when I begged for ityou repulsed me with a polite joke. You dressed me like a doll. You played with me as with a child.... I want to go away from you.... Let me, let me.’ And Nora (p. 110): ‘I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald.... You and your father have sinned greatly against me. It is the fault of you two that nothing has been made of me. I was never happy, only merry.... Our house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa’s doll-child.... That is why I am going away from you now.... I shall now leave your house at once.’ Ellida (The Lady from the Sea): ‘What I want is that we should, of our own free will, release each other.... I am not what you took me for. Now you see it yourself. Now we can separate as friends, and freely.... Here there is no single thing that attracts me and binds me. I am so absolutely rootless in your house, Wangel.’ Selma threatens to leave, Ellida resolves to leave, Nora does leave, Mrs. Alving did leave. (Ghosts, p. 144) Pastor Manders: ‘All your efforts have been bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You have never been willing to endure any bond. Everything that has weighed upon you in life you have cast away without care or conscience, like a burden you could throw off at will. It did not please you to be a wife any longer, and you left your husband. You found it troublesome to be a mother, and you sent your child forth among strangers.’ Mrs. Bernick was, equally with her double, Mrs. Alving, a stranger in her own house. She, however, does not wish to leave, but to remain and endeavour to win over her husband (p. 112): ‘For many years I believed that you had once been mine, and I had lost you again. Now I know that you never were mine; but I shall win you.’ Dina (The Pillars of Society) cannot leave because she is not yet married, but as becomes her state of maidenhood, she gives her rebellious thoughts this form (p. 93): ‘I will be your wife; but first I will work, and become something for myself, just as you are. I will give myself; I will not be taken.’ Rebecca (Rosmersholm) is also unmarried, yet she runs away (p. 96):
I am going.Rosmer.Where are you going, Rebecca?Rebecca.North, by the steamer. It was there I came from.Rosmer.But you have no ties there now.Rebecca.I have none here either.Rosmer.What do you think of doing?Rebecca.I don’t know. I only want to have done with it all.
I am going.
Rosmer.Where are you going, Rebecca?
Rebecca.North, by the steamer. It was there I came from.
Rosmer.But you have no ties there now.
Rebecca.I have none here either.
Rosmer.What do you think of doing?
Rebecca.I don’t know. I only want to have done with it all.
Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies his ego-mania without giving offence to society. This personage presents himself under the names successively ofTorvald Helmer, Consul Bernick, Curate Rörlund, Rector Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster Stockmann, Werle, and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler, always with the same ideas and the same words. InA Doll’s House(p. 104,et seq.), after his wife’s confession, Helmer cries: ‘Oh, what an awful awakening!... No religion, no morality, no sense of duty.... He can publish the whole story; and if he does publish it, perhaps I should be suspected of having been a party to your criminal transactions.... I must try to pacify him in one way or the other. The story must be kept secret, cost what it may.’ InGhostsPastor Manders on different occasions expresses himself thus: ‘One is certainly not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and thinks within one’s own four walls.... We must not expose ourselves to false interpretations, and we have no right whatever to give offence to our neighbours.... You go and risk your good name and reputation, and nearly succeed in ruining other people’s reputation into the bargain. It was unspeakably reckless of you to seek refuge with me.... Yes, that is the only thing possible’ (to ‘hush the matter up’) ‘... yes, family life is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such a case as you point to’ (an incestuous union), ‘one can never know.’ Rörlund (The Pillars of Society): ‘See how the family is undermined over there! how a brazen spirit of destruction is attacking the most vital truths!... Of course, a tare now and then springs up among the wheat, alas! but we honestly do our best to weed it out.... Oh, Dina, you can form no conception of the thousand considerations! When a man is placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why—he cannot be too careful.... Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me! Hush! someone is coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the others.... A good book forms a refreshing contrast to what we unhappily see every day in newspapers and magazines.’ Consul Bernick, in the same piece: ‘Just at this time, when I depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press and in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all over the country-side.... These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping at us.... I whose mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t do for me to have my name bespattered in this way.... I must keep my conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression on both the press and the public at large when they see that I set aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its course.’ Kroll, inRosmersholm: ‘Do you ever see the Radical papers?... But you’ve seen, then, I suppose, how these gentlemen of “the people” have been pleased to treat me?what infamous abuse they’ve dared to heap upon me?’ Werle, inThe Wild Duck: ‘Even if, out of attachment to me, she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that——?’ The Burgomaster, inAn Enemy of the People: ‘If, perhaps, I do watch over my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the good of the town.... Your statement ... must be kept back for the good of all ... we will do the best we can quietly; but nothing whatever, not a single word, of this unfortunate business must be made public.... And then you have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every possible and impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an idea than you must write at once some newspaper article or a whole pamphlet about it.’ Finally, Hedda Gabler: ‘And so you went off perfectly openly?... But what do you suppose that people will say about you, then?... I so dread a scandal! You should accept for your own sake, or, better still, for the world’s sake.’
If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are read successively, an impression must be formed that they are part of the samerôle; and this impression is correct, for under all the different names there is only onerôle. The same is true of the women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora, unselfishly sacrifice themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel, Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are always the same figure in different guises. The monotony, moreover, extends to minutest details. Rank’s inherited disease is in Oswald’s case only carried further. Nora’s flight is repeated in almost every piece, and inThe Wild Duckis travestied in Hjalmar’s departure from his house. One feature of this scene appears word for word in all theréchauffésof it:
Nora.Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage everything in the house far better than I do.Ellida.If I do go ... I haven’t a key to give up, an order to give.... I am absolutely rootless in your house, etc.
Nora.Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage everything in the house far better than I do.
Ellida.If I do go ... I haven’t a key to give up, an order to give.... I am absolutely rootless in your house, etc.
InA Doll’s House, the heroine, who has settled her account with life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe, makes Rank play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she dances to it. InHedda Gabler, the heroine is heard ‘suddenly playing a wild dance’ before she shoots herself. Rosmer says to Rebecca, when the latter makes known her wish to die: ‘No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do whatshedared.’ The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to commit suicide: ‘Oh, you don’t frighten me! An elegant spoilt lady like you.... People don’t do things of that sort.’ Brack says, in response to Hedda Gabler’s outburst: ‘Rather die! That’s what people say, but nobody does it!’ In muchthe same words Helmer reproaches his wife Nora with having sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor Manders upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick, and Rebecca from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle’s crime was the seduction of the maidservant Gina. Alving’s crime was the seduction of his own maidservant. This pitiable and imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this impotence of his indolent brain to wash out the imprint of an idea once painfully elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of names for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under the influence of a reminiscence. InA Doll’s Housewe have Helmer; inThe Wild Duck, Hjalmar; inThe Pillars of Society, Hilmar, Mrs. Bernick’s brother.
Thus Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees, at each shaking of the cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this toy. But adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always the same, inserted haphazard, and united into symmetrical figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not only to Ibsen’s plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for thirty years he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic patterns, these are his obsessions. These have existed in his own diseased mind, and have not sprung from observation of the world’s drama. The pretended ‘realist’ knows nothing of real life. He does not comprehend it; he does not even see it, and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions, ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manufacturing cannon is to take a tube and pour molten metal round it. Ibsen proceeds in a similar way with his poems. He has a thesis—more accurately, some anarchistic folly; this is the tube. It is now only a question of enveloping this tube with the metal of life’s realities. But that lies beyond Ibsen’s power. At best he occasionally finds some bits of worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box, by rummaging among dust-heaps; but this small quantity of metal does not suffice for a cannon. Where Ibsen makes strenuous efforts to produce a picture of actual contemporaneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his experience.
Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this. It sinks below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber and Sir John Lubbock have recorded incidents of this sortin their observations of colonies of ants. The small features pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole life have never formed a clearer thought than: ‘How can I get hold of a bottle of brandy?’ or ‘How can I make myself interesting to men?’ The sole characteristic distinguishing these Lövborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas, do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to require strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the obtaining of a position in a bank (A Doll’s House); their catastrophes, that one no longer believes in the articles of their creed (Rosmersholm); the loss of an appointment as physician at a watering-place (An Enemy of the People); the raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnalpéché de jeunesse(The Pillars of Society); the frightful crimes darkening, like a thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their social circle are an intrigue with a maidservant (Ghosts,The Wild Duck); aliaisonwith an itinerant music-hall singer (An Enemy of the People); the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (The Wild Duck); the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good dinner (Hedda Gabler). It sometimes happens to me to pass a half-hour in the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter and play of the little ones. One day the children by accident saw the arrest of someone in the street. Although their attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant spectacle, they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found them full of the great event, and I became the auditor of the following dialogue:
Matilda(aged three years). Why did they put the gentleman in prison?Richard(five years old, very dignified and sententious). It wasn’t a gentleman; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was wicked.Matilda.What had he done then?Richard(after reflecting a little). His mamma had said he wasn’t to take chocolate; but he did take chocolate. That’s why his mamma had him put in prison.
Matilda(aged three years). Why did they put the gentleman in prison?
Richard(five years old, very dignified and sententious). It wasn’t a gentleman; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was wicked.
Matilda.What had he done then?
Richard(after reflecting a little). His mamma had said he wasn’t to take chocolate; but he did take chocolate. That’s why his mamma had him put in prison.
This childish conversation always came into my mind when I lighted, in Ibsen’s plays, upon one of his crimes treated with such overawing importance.
We have now made the complete tour of Ibsen. At the risk of being prolix and tedious, I have made copious quotations from his writings, in order that the reader might himself see the matter from which I have formed my judgments.Ibsen stands before us as a mystic and an ego-maniac, who would willingly prove the world and mankind not worth powder and shot, but who only proves that he has not the faintest inkling of one or the other. Incapable of adapting himself to any state of things whatsoever, he first abuses the state of things in Norway, then that of Europe generally. In no one of his productions is a single thought to be met with belonging to, or having an active influence on, the present age, unless we bestow this honour on his anarchism, which is explained by the diseased constitution of his mind, and his travesties of the least certain results of investigations in hypnotism and telepathy. He is a skilful dramatic technician, and knows how to represent with great poetic power personages in the background, and situations out of the chief current of the piece. This, however, is all that a conscientious and lucid analysis can really find in him. He has dared to speak of his ‘moral ideas,’ and his admirers glibly repeat the expression. Ibsen’s moral ideas! Any reader of the Ibsen drama, who finds inthemno food for laughter, has truly no sense of humour. He seems to preach apostacy, yet cannot free himself from the religious ideas of confession, original sin, and the Saviour’s act of redemption. He sets up egoism and the freedom of the individual from all scruples as an ideal, yet hardly has anyone acted somewhat unscrupulously, but he begins to whimper contritely, and continues until his heart, full to suffocation, has poured itself out in confession; while the only persons with whom he succeeds are women, who sacrifice their individuality to the point of annihilation for the sake of others. He extols every offence against morality as heroism, while he punishes, with nothing less than death, the smallest and stupidest love affair. He uses the words freedom, progress, etc., as a gargle, and in his best works honours lying and stagnation. And all these contradictions appear forsooth not successively as stations on the road of his development, but at one and the same time, and side by side. His French admirer, Ehrhard,[358]sees this disconcerting fact, and endeavours as best he can to excuse it. His Norwegian interpreter, Henrik Jaeger, on the contrary, asserts with the utmost placidity[359]that the most prominent characteristic of Ibsen’s works is their unity(Enhed). The Frenchman and the Norwegian were most incautious in not preconcerting, prior to praising their great man in manners so divergent. The single discoverable unity in Ibsen is his faculty of distortion. The point in which he always resembles himself is his entire incapacity to elaborate a single clear thought, to comprehend a single one of the watchwords daubed here and there on to his works, or to deduce the true conclusions from a single one of his premises.
And this malignant, anti-social simpleton, highly gifted, it must be admitted, in the technique of the stage, they have had the audacity to try to raise upon the shield as the great world-poet of the closing century. His partizans have continued to shout, ‘Ibsen is a great poet!’ until all stronger judgments have become at least hesitating, and feebler ones wholly subjugated. In a recent book on Simon Magus,[360]there occurs this pretty story: ‘Apsethus, the Libyan, wished to become a god. In spite, however, of his most strenuous efforts he could not succeed in satisfying his longing. But, at any rate, he would make the people believe that he had become a god. He therefore collected a large number of parrots, in which Libya abounds, and shut them all in a cage. He kept them so for some time, and taught them to say, “Apsethus is a god.” When the birds had learnt this, he opened the cage and set them free. And the birds spread themselves throughout Libya, so that the words penetrated to the Greek settlements. And the Libyans, astonished at the voice of the birds, and not suspecting the trick Apsethus had played, looked upon him as a god.’ In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, Ibsen has taught a few ‘comprehensives’—the Brandes, Ehrhards, Jaegers, etc.—the words: ‘Ibsen is a modern! Ibsen is a poet of the future!’ and the parrots have spread over all the lands, and are chattering with deafening din in books and papers, ‘Ibsen is great! Ibsen is a modern spirit!’ and imbeciles among the public murmur the cry after them, because they hear it frequently repeated, and because, on such as they, every word uttered with emphasis and assurance makes an impression.
It would certainly be a proof of superficiality to believe that the audacity of his Corybantes alone explains the high place to which Ibsen has been fraudulently elevated. Without question he possesses characteristics by which he could not but act upon his contemporaries.
Firstly, we have his vague phrases and indefinite incidental hints concerning ‘the great epoch in which we live,’ ‘the new era about to dawn,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘progress,’ etc. These phrases were bound to please all dreamers and drivellers, for theygive free scope to any interpretation, and, in particular, allow the presumption that their author is possessed of modernity and a bold spirit of progress. They are not discouraged by the fact that Ibsen himself makes cruel sport of these ‘comprehensives,’ when, inThe Wild Duck, he makes Relling (p. 361) use the word ‘demoniac,’ while admitting it to be wholly meaningless, just as the poet himself employs his own bunkum about progress and freedom. They are ‘comprehensives’ precisely because they interpret every passage according to their own sweet will.
Then there is Ibsen’s doctrine of the right of the individual to live in accordance with his own law. Is this really his doctrine? This must be denied when, after struggling through his countless contradictions and self-refutations, we see that he treats with peculiar affection the sacrificial lambs, who are all negation of their own ‘I,’ all suppression of their most natural impulses, all neighbourly love and consideration for others. In any case, his apostles have brought forward anarchistic individualism as the central doctrine of his drama. Ehrhard[361]sums up this doctrine in these words: ‘The revolt of the individual against society. In other words, Ibsen is the apostle of moral autonomy (autonomie morale).’ Now such a doctrine is surely well fitted to cause ravages among the intellectually indolent or intellectually incapable.
Ehrhard dares to use the expression ‘moral autonomy.’ In the name of this fine principle Ibsen’s critical heralds persuade the youth who gather round him that they have the right to ‘live out their lives,’ and they smile approvingly when their auditors understand by this term the right to yield to their basest instincts and to free themselves from all discipline. As the scoundrels in Mediterranean ports do with well-dressed travellers, they whisper in the ear of their public, ‘Amuse yourselves! Enjoy yourselves! Come with me; I will show you the way!’ But to confound ‘moral autonomy’ with absence of restraint is, on the part of their faith, a monstrous error, and in the corrupters of youth, hoping for the pay of procuration, an infamous deception.
These two notions are not only not synonymous, they are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Liberty of the individual! The right to autonomy! The Ego its own legislator! Who is this ‘I’ that is to make laws for itself? Who is this ‘Self’ for whom Ibsen demands the right of autonomy? Who is this free individual? That the entire notion of a Self opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and exclusive is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen in the chapter on the ‘Psychology of Ego-mania,’ and I neednot, therefore, dwell again on the subject in this place. We know that man, like every other complex and highly developed living being, is a society or state, of simpler, and of simplest, living beings, of cells and cell-systems, or organs, all having their own functions and wants. In the course of the development of life on earth they have become associated, and have undergone changes, in order to be able to perform higher functions than are possible to the simple cell and primitive agglomeration of cells. The highest function of life yet known to us is clear consciousness; the most elevated content of consciousness is knowledge; and the most obvious and immediate aim of knowledge is constantly to procure better conditions of life for the organism, hence to preserve its existence as long as possible, and to fill it with the greatest possible number of pleasurable sensations. In order that the collective organism may be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound to submit to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its interior is disease, and leads rapidly to death. The single cell executes its chemical work of decomposition and of integration without troubling itself about aught else. It labours almost for itself alone. Its consciousness is the most limited conceivable; it has hardly any prevision; its own power of adaptation is so minute that if a cell is in the smallest degree less well nourished than its neighbour, it cannot hold its ground against the latter, and is immediately devoured by it.[362]The differentiated cell-group, or organ, already possesses a wider consciousness, whose seat is its own nerve-ganglia; its function is more complex, and no longer operates wholly, or even chiefly, for its own benefit, but for that of the collective organism; it also has already, I might say, a constitutional influence on the direction of the affairs of the whole organism, asserting itself in the power of the organ to suggest to consciousness presentations prompting the will to acts. The most exalted organ, however, the condensation of all the other organs, is the gray cerebral cortex. It is the seat of clear consciousness. It works least of all for itself, most of all for the commonwealth—i.e., for the whole organism. It is the government of the State. To it come all reports from the interior as well as the exterior; it has to find its way in the midst of all complications; it has to exercise foresight, and to take into consideration not only the immediate effect of an act,but also the more remote consequences for the commonwealth. When, therefore, it is a question of the ‘I,’ the ‘Self,’ the ‘Individual,’ it cannot be any subordinate part of the organism which is meant, such as the little toe or the rectum, but only the gray cerebral cortex. To it certainly belongs the right and duty of directing the individual and of prescribing its law. It is consciousness itself. But how does consciousness form its judgments and its decisions? It forms them from representations awakened in it by excitations proceeding from the internal organs and from the senses. If consciousness allows itself to be directed solely by the organic excitations, it seeks to gratify its momentary appetites, on the spot, at the cost of well-being, it injures an organ by favouring the need of another, and it neglects to take into consideration circumstances of the external world which must be dealt with in the interest of the whole organism. Let me give some quite simple illustrations. A man is swimming under water. His cells know nothing of it, and do not trouble themselves about it. They quietly absorb from the blood the oxygen which they need at the moment, and set free, in exchange, carbonic dioxide. The decomposed blood excites the medulla oblongata, and the latter impetuously demands a movement of inspiration. Were the gray cerebral cortex to yield to the perfectly justifiable demand of one organ, and allow an impulse to inspire to proceed to the muscles concerned, the consequence would be the filling of the lungs with water, and death of the entire organism in consequence. Hence consciousness does not obey the demand of the medulla oblongata, and, instead of sending motor impulses to the intercostal muscles and those of the diaphragm, communicates them to the muscles of the arms and legs; instead of breathing under water, the swimmer emerges at the surface. Another instance. A typhoid convalescent feels ragingly hungry. Were he to yield to this desire, he might give himself a momentary satisfaction, but twenty-four hours later he would probably die from perforation of the intestines. Hence his consciousness resists the desire of his organs for the benefit of the whole organism. The cases are, of course, generally much more complex. But it is always the task of consciousness to test the stimuli which it receives from the depths of the organs, to comprise in the motor images which they excite all its earlier experiences, its knowledge, the directions given by the external world, and to disregard the stimuli if the judgments opposed to them are more powerful than they.
Even a perfectly healthy organism quickly goes to rack and ruin if the inhibitive activity of consciousness is not exercised, and if, through this want of exercise, its inhibitive strengthbecomes atrophied. Cæsarian madness[363]is nothing but the consequence of the systematic indulgence by consciousness of every demand of the organs. If, however, the organism is not perfectly healthy; if it is degenerate, its ruin is much more speedy and certain when it obeys the urging of its organs, for in such a case these organs are suffering from perversions; they exact satisfactions, not only pernicious in their remote consequences to the whole organism, but immediately so to the organs themselves.
When, therefore, the ‘I’ is spoken of, which is to have the right to dispose of itself, only the conscious ‘Ego’ can be meant, the pondering, remembering, observing, comparing intellect, not, however, the sub-’Egos’—unconnected, and for the most part at strife with each other—which are included in subconsciousness.[364]The individual is the judging, not the instinctive, human being. Liberty is the capacity of consciousness to derive excitations, not only from the stimuli of the organs, but from those of the senses, and from original memory-images. Ibsen’s liberty is the most abject, and always suicidal,[365]slavery. It is the subjugation of judgment to instinct, and the revolt of some single organ against the domination of that power, which has to watch over the well-being of the whole organism. Even so individualistic a philosopher as Herbert Spencer[366]says: ‘To become fitted for the social state, it is necessary that the man ... should possess the energy capable of renouncing a small enjoyment of the moment, in order to obtain a greater one in the future.’ A healthy man in the full vigour of intellect cannot sacrifice his judgment. Thesacrifizio dell’ intellettois the only one he cannot afford. If law and custom impose upon him acts which he recognises as absurd because they defeat their end, not only will he have the right, but it will be his duty, to defend reason against nonsense, and knowledge against error.But his revolt will always be in the name of judgment, not in the name of instinct.
All this philosophy of self-restraint can, it is true, be preached to healthy human beings only. It has no application to degenerates. Their defective brain and nervous system are not in a state to respond to its demands. The processes within their organs are morbidly intensified. Hence the latter send particularly powerful stimuli to consciousness. The sensory nerves conduct badly. The memory-images in the brain are faint. Perceptions of the external world, representations of anterior experiences, are, therefore, non-existent or too feeble to subdue the stimulus originating in the organs. Such persons can do nought else but follow their desires and impulsions. They are the ‘instinctivists’ and ‘impulsivists’ of mental therapeutics. To this species belong the Noras, Ellidas, Rebeccas, Stockmanns, Brands, etc. This company, being dangerous to themselves and to others, require to be put under the guardianship of rational men, or, better still, in lunatic asylums. Such must be the answer to those fools or charlatans who vaunt Ibsen’s figures as ‘free men’ and ‘strong personalities,’ and with the sweet-sounding tones of a Pied Piper’s air on ‘self-disposal,’ ‘moral independence,’ and ‘living life out,’ attract children devoid of judgment heaven knows whither, but in any case to their ruin.
The third feature of Ibsen’s drama accounting for his success is the light in which he shows woman. ‘Women are the pillars of society,’ he makes Bernick say (inThe Pillars of Society, p. 114). With Ibsen woman has no duties and all rights. The tie of marriage does not bind her. She runs away when she longs for liberty, or when she believes she has cause of complaint against her husband, or when he pleases her a little less than another man. The man who plays the Joseph, and does not comply with the will of Madame Potiphar, does not draw on himself the customary ridicule; he is roundly pronounced a criminal (Ghosts, p. 158):