^^15^ UNIVERSITY 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 PT 8895.R64 
 
 Henrik Ibsen, 
 
 3 1924 026 309 553 
 
B Cornell University 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026309553 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME: 
 3. M. SYNGE 
 
 By p. p. Howe 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 By John Dbinkwater 
 
 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 
 By a. Martin Freguan 
 

HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 R. ELLIS ROBERTS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 MARTIN SECKER 
 
 NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET 
 
 ADELPHI 
 
 MlQMXII 
 
BT THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 POEMS 
 
 A ROMAN PILGRIMAGE 
 
 SAMUEL ROGERS & HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Etc. 
 
 pr 
 
 ^"^ofi^Z 
 
 '~\ oAc-^/s ^ . '', f^.h^^cf ^ //t s 
 
 I'l I ) 
 
TO MY BROTHER 
 
 WILLIAM CORBETT ROBERTS 
 
 Whose library gave me 
 my first introduction to 
 Ibsen sixteen years ago. 
 
 ■fS«J' 
 
NOTE 
 
 In writing this study I have used Mr. Archer's 
 definitive edition of Henrik Ibsen's works ; also 
 the earlier editions of his versions issued by 
 Walter Scott. I have also used the current 
 Norwegian editions of separate plays, but have 
 not seen the final collected issue. The translations 
 from Digte and Peer Gynt are my own ; those 
 from Brand and the Prose Plays are based on 
 Mr. Garrett's version, and Mr. Archer's, but 
 I have not scrupled to alter a phrase if I felt 
 I could get closer to Ibsen's meaning and to 
 English idiom ; the same confession must be 
 made with regard to citations from Ibsen's letters, 
 which are in the main taken from Miss Morison's 
 edition. I need hardly say that, when I have 
 altered, I have only done so after considerable 
 thought ; I appreciate fiiUy the enormous diffi- 
 culty of translating Ibsen, and believe that in this 
 work we shall only reach success by the continued 
 effiarts of different hands. The quotations at 
 the beginning of the various chapters are all 
 from Ibsen's letters or speeches. I have often 
 disregarded their original context, but I hope 
 
 7 
 
NOTE 
 
 they are sufficiently apposite for this to be 
 forgiven. 
 
 I have read no critical books for this study, 
 save Mr. Archer's invaluable introductions, Dr. 
 Brandes' three essays, and Mr. Wicksteed's four 
 lectures ; I have purposely avoided consulting 
 books that had at all the same purpose as this. 
 I must here, however, acknowledge that I have 
 been anticipated in one of my principal criticisms 
 on the "Ibsenite" school by Sir A. Quiller- 
 Couch, who in an essay on Peer Gynt insists 
 far more ably than I on Ibsen's essential behef 
 in self-sacrifice. I had not read Sir Arthur 
 Quiller-Couch's essay when I first wrote what 
 I felt about Ibsen's view of salvation by love ; 
 but I am proud to find myself in agreement 
 with so sane and acute a critic. The essay is to 
 be found in the volume entitled "Adventures 
 in Criticism." "R IT "R 
 
 January Z6th, 1912. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. BIOGRAPHICAL 11 
 
 II. THE POEMS : THE HISTORICAL PLAYS : 
 
 LOVE'S COMEDY 48 
 
 III. BRAND: PEER GYNT 61 
 
 IV. EMPEROR AND GALILEAN 88 
 
 V. THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH : THE PILLARS 
 
 OF SOCIETY: A DOLL'S HOUSE 95 
 
 VI. GHOSTS : AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE : 
 
 THE WILI> DUCK 115 
 
 VII. ROSMERSHOLM : THE LADY FROM THE 
 
 SEA: HEDX)A GABLER 138 
 
 VIII. THE MASTER-BUILDER: LITTLE EYOLF: 
 JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN : WHEN 
 WE DEAD AWAKEN 157 
 
 IX. CONCLUSIONS 179 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 I have always loved stormy weather. 1891 
 
 Nothing is easier than bias except, for certain 
 crooked and unsanguine temperaments, that in- 
 difference which deprives all judgments of value, 
 and divorces interest from investigation, alienat- 
 ing altogether the passion from the search for 
 truth. I believe that the main vice of our 
 modern critical attitude may be attributed to 
 one of these two faults, faults radical and 
 essential, which I have stated. Either the critic 
 of modem men and affairs, the appraiser of life, 
 art and religion, treads easily in an eager 
 advocacy of anjrthing but the whole truth ; 
 or he treats the whole truth with a precision 
 so indefatigably neat that it is inhuman in 
 method and result. Instances jump to the 
 memory. One recalls the passionate pleadings 
 of Carlyle or Ruskin and contrasts them with 
 
 11 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 the cold, judicial, if you like — but never 
 judicious — use of the machinery of criticism 
 by Spencer or, in a different realm. Professor 
 Frazer. Criticism the world over, but particu- 
 larly English criticism, speaks vfith the accent 
 either of the bar or the bench — but it has been 
 a bar whose rhetoric has dealt almost entirely 
 with men and passions rather than with cases 
 and general law, and a bench whose whole talent 
 has been heavily directed towards theories and 
 generalizations rather than towards human values 
 and realities. 
 
 Now criticism has no kinship with the law; 
 to treat any artist as a litigant is immediately to 
 run the risk of making art herself not an atmo- 
 sphere, an inspiration, an inevitable part of life so 
 much as an acquired habit of living, a profession 
 rather than a vocation. The compelling force 
 that drives the artist, however humble, to ex- 
 press himself in words, in music, in paint, in 
 stone, is just part of that huge scheme of 
 Nature's which does not leave any man without 
 some power of real self-expression and self- 
 release. 
 
 It is here that one school of criticism makes 
 its mistakes: it is separatist. After making 
 necessary, though conventional divisions of art- 
 forms, it tends to regard art only from within, 
 to neglect the relation of art to life, without 
 
 12 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 which all art becomes mischievous. So you 
 find the man in the street, driven frantic by 
 the false claims of specialism, frankly opposing 
 poetry and practice, art and reality — and the 
 end of the whole deplorable business is the 
 growth of little, sterile art-games which make 
 the decent man of his hands sicken at the word 
 "Art." But if it is true that Art, just as 
 plowing, or priestcraft, or fighting, or love is 
 really Life in motion, it is equally true that the 
 artist wears his life with a difference. That this 
 difference is just the fact that he writes a lyric 
 instead of following a furrow is the thing which 
 other critics will not realize : the critic, who 
 borrows the accent of the advocate, ascribes 
 to the artist motives that are not his, either as 
 artist or as man ; an extreme instance is the 
 case of the critic who claimed Dante as a 
 Puritan. In dealing with modern Art the 
 critic generally acclaims anyone who deals in 
 problems that stir his enthusiasm as an advocate 
 for causes which the artist has noticed only as 
 part of the make-up of his characters, or as 
 implicit in the thought of his time. 
 
 The artist, if we take him as he ought to be, 
 has two passions — he longs to relieve himself 
 and he wants to express himself. There is a 
 real difference here. The first process, the agony 
 to get rid of what possesses him, to " cleanse his 
 
 13 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 bosom of much perilous stuff," is found in nearly 
 every man : for art, I cannot say too often, is 
 a thing entirely natural and human and inevitable, 
 not a thing of the tea-table, the studio and the 
 clique. But while all men long for this self-reliev- 
 ing, the man whom we call specifically artist 
 has the longing more consciously than his fellows, 
 and seeks his relief in any of those varied ways 
 which we call artistic. Here comes in the second 
 passion of the artist, the need for self-expression. 
 Now the first passion concerns himself, this 
 second concerns an audience — and no artist, not 
 even FitzGerald the recluse, or Cezanne who, as 
 his admirers tell us, left his pictures in the fields 
 to astonish, not the bourgeois, but the cattle, 
 can dispense with an audience. Most artists 
 want appreciation, a few desire criticism, but 
 all need attention. And it is the balance be- 
 tween the twin passions of self- relieving and 
 self-expression that always marks the truly 
 great artist. A man's art becomes more and 
 more perfect as he learns more precisely how 
 to give form to that fierce inspiration — the 
 navla of Plato — whose expulsion is his primary 
 need. 
 
 It is easiest to show the significance of this 
 by instances. Dante has a perfect correspond- 
 ence between message and method, style and 
 subject : in Michael Angelo, on the other hand, 
 
 14 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 the subject gradually overcame his style, as may 
 be seen in the final effort of his spirit, the 
 fresco of the Last Judgment. Or to take two 
 English artists : Blake in his later works and in 
 practically all his paintings never achieved any 
 satisfying union between his vision and his ex- 
 pression: Francis Thompson's least lyric or 
 greatest ode is packed with the truth, the 
 revelation that was assured to him ; in his work 
 as in the greater Dante, there is a harmony of 
 will and power, only comparable to a perfect 
 union of body and mind. What we must 
 always remember is that for the true artist this 
 harmony is the goal. No serious artist has ever 
 hstened to the overstrained clamour of the 
 moralist, or to the shriller cries of those who 
 dance around the unfertile altar of art divorced 
 from ethics. It is precisely the artist who knows 
 that the separation between Truth and Beauty 
 is one of words, not of facts ; that the schism lies 
 not in the nature of things, but in the crooked 
 will of misinterpreting man. 
 
 The man with whom this essay deals has, 
 partly no doubt owing to certain faults in his 
 work, too rarely been treated as an artist. I 
 may, in spite of my resolutions, fail myself to 
 keep clear the distinction between Ibsen and the 
 Ibsenite, between the drama of Ibsen and the 
 comedy of Ibsenism, but I would warn any who 
 
 15 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 pick this book up that it is not a work on the 
 marriage problem or on heredity or on women's 
 rights, but an effort to state the position and to 
 appraise the art of the greatest dramatist Europe 
 has had since Shakespeare ana Calderon, to give 
 some estimate of the man whom posterity will 
 regard as we do the great dramatists of Peri- 
 clean Athens and Elizabethan London ; of the 
 dramatist whose work is as human as Shake- 
 speare's, as certain as Congreve's, and as modern 
 as Balzac's. 
 
 In re-reading Ibsen I noticed again and again 
 how much our modern novelists and dramatists 
 owe to him and his characters — novel after 
 popular novel can be traced back to A Dolts 
 House, to Ghosts, to The Lady from the Sea, to 
 Rosmersholm, or to Little Eyolf: character after 
 character has its prototype in Hedda Gabler, or 
 in Hilda, or in Borkman, or in Tesman : and is 
 not the nineteenth-century man, with his aspira- 
 tions and failures, his determined effort to make 
 the best of science and religion, to have his 
 hands in the pockets of Mammon and his feet on 
 the threshold of God's temple, to deal out justice 
 while he sues for mercy, to sin in earnest and 
 repent in jest, to live on the woman whom he 
 patronizes and to toady to the God whom he 
 denies — is not he drawn for all time in the pic- 
 tures of Brand and Peer Gynt ? 
 
 16 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20th, 1828. 
 It was the year that also saw the birth of two 
 of his greatest contemporaries in creative art, 
 Leo Nikolaivitch Tolstoy and George Meredith. 
 Meredith and Tolstoy both betray their nation- 
 alities, the sorrow of the steppes and the pride of 
 great Russia were in the brain of the author of 
 War and Peace; and in Meredith the conqueror 
 Celt had almost equal sway with the conquered 
 Saxon. It is worth noticing, perhaps, that while 
 Tolstoy was Russian for generations, and Mere- 
 dith, on one side Welsh and on the other English, 
 Ibsen, in whose later work, at least, nationality 
 never appears, was the descendant of a Dane, 
 who migrated to Bergen in 1720 : his son, 
 Ibsen's great-grandfather, married a Scot, and 
 Ibsen's grandmother and mother were of Ger- 
 man origin. The cosmopolitanism of race, 
 combined with his long residence in other coun- 
 tries than the Norway of his birth, no doubt 
 helped in giving to his work that universal 
 quality which has made his plays the property 
 of every civilized stage. 
 
 As a boy, Ibsen had characteristics which can 
 be found in many children who do not after- 
 wards develop the promise of an imaginative 
 childhood. He was a vivid dreamer ; he occu- 
 pied his spare time in building, and he loved to 
 make little puppets of pasteboard and arrange 
 B 17 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 them in tableaux. A passion for painting was 
 allowed to die, owing to his father's lack of means, 
 and when Ibsen was fifteen years old he was 
 apprenticed to an apothecary in a provincial 
 Norwegian town. I do not think we need sup- 
 pose he was very discontented with this life ; at 
 any rate he was sufficiently touched by his 
 environment to begin reading for his matricula- 
 tion at Christiania University, intending to pur- 
 sue the medical course. He was a youth who 
 developed his talent slowly ; poems that he 
 wrote about the year 1848 — inspired by various 
 political upheavals — were evidently, from his 
 own description, of little value ; and his first 
 play, Catalina, written when he was twenty- 
 one, has purely an interest of cvu'iosity. 
 
 In 1850 Ibsen was living at Christiania with a 
 friend who admired his work and had paid for 
 the publication of Catalina. They were in great 
 poverty, and for two or three days in this dismal 
 period they lived on Ibsen's first play, after sell- 
 ing the first edition as waste paper. A great 
 advantage of his removal to the capital was that 
 he met men who were his intellectual com- 
 panions, Bjornsterne Bjornson and Jonas Lie 
 and Vinje, a name not so familiar to English 
 people. He dabbled in journalism and in 
 political agitation, and wrote another play 
 whose merits were entirely derivative. 
 
 18 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Hitherto his career bears a remarkable resem- 
 blance to that of almost any of the more prominent 
 of our early romantics, Leigh Hunt, or Shelley, 
 or Southey or Coleridge. But in 1850 — the 
 year of Wordsworth's death — an event occurred 
 which definitely secured Ibsen for the stage. 
 Ole Bull, a keen Norwegian and a great viohnist, 
 established at Bergen a national Norwegian 
 Theatre and appointed Ibsen his first " theatre- 
 poet." This incident, with its momentous conse- 
 quences, gives the lie yet again to the old fallacy 
 that the great artist is quite independent of 
 circumstances. The founding of the Bergen 
 theatre may be counted as immediately respon- 
 sible for the rise of Norwegian drama ; just as, 
 in our own time, we have seen the growth of an 
 Irish drama simply due to the single-hearted 
 enthusiasm of a few men and women and their 
 belief that, given the opportunity, Ireland could 
 produce plays. 
 
 For six years Ibsen maintained his connection 
 with that theatre, and it would be difficult to 
 exaggerate the value of the practical experience 
 he gained : he was dramatic author and stage- 
 manager, and his comparative failure in the 
 latter capacity was no doubt as useful to him as 
 his comparative success as a playwright. The 
 plays he wrote for the Bergen theatre are of 
 very varied merit. The first, St. John's Night, 
 
 19 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 has never been printed and was a failure. The 
 next year he revised and revived the play he 
 wrote at Christiania, The Warrior's Barrow; 
 and in 1855 he produced Lady Inger of Ostrat, 
 a work of very different calibre. 
 
 Its greater value is probably due to the fact 
 that it was the fruit of a violent love-affair, which 
 also inspired several lyrics. Ibsen was a young 
 man of twenty-seven, and his friendship with 
 Henrikke Hoist was of the most romantic: 
 there is no need to seek for Henrikke's features 
 in the ladies of the play, or to be surprised that 
 the apparent connection between his passion and 
 his drama is so slight. It would be foolish to 
 ask from the author of Peer Gynt and John 
 Gabriel Borkman a close correspondence be- 
 tween actual facts and poetic realities ; he is 
 concerned with deeper truths, and he knew that 
 his maiden-love was the cause of this new and 
 greater power of achievement. 
 
 In 1855 Ibsen produced The Feast of Sol- 
 haug, a play with a certain moonlit beauty, but 
 with no great claims to strength or originahty ; 
 and the last play produced at Bergen, Olaf 
 Liliekrans, a work I have not read, is described 
 by all critics as a weak effort in the same 
 romantic manner. Shortly after the production 
 of The Feast of Solhaug Ibsen met Susanna 
 Dae Thoresen, whom two years afterwards he 
 
 20 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 married. Only one child was born to them, 
 Sigurd Ibsen, on December 23rd, 1859. The 
 time has not come to estimate the exact in- 
 fluence which his marriage had on Ibsen : only a 
 few documents about, or letters to, his wife have 
 been published, and these disclose little except 
 that he was as a young man obviously in love, 
 and that in later life he was affectionately looked 
 after by his wife. It would be rash, for instance, 
 to draw any conclusions from the fact that Love's 
 Comedy was written after three years of married 
 life ; for that cynical little play, according to the 
 author himself, was approved of only by his 
 wife. "Hers," he goes on to say, "is precisely the 
 character which a man of intellect desires — she 
 is illogical, but has strong poetic feelings, a 
 broad and liberal mind, and a hatred almost 
 passionate for all petty considerations." Ibsen 
 also says in the same document — a letter written 
 for biographical purposes in 1870 — that he had 
 the same model for Hiordis in The Vikings at 
 Helgeland and for Svanbild in Love's Comedy. 
 This, taken with the fact that he wrote The 
 Vikings during his engagement, is the best key 
 we have to the character of Susanna Ibsen. 
 There seems little doubt that the character of 
 his wife and her sister — who died in 1874 — 
 furnished Ibsen with those two types of women 
 — the forceful, direct and rather ruthless and the 
 
 21 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 strong, gentle, untiring and faithful — who recur 
 so frequently in his plays. Doubtless, too, Ibsen's 
 increased preoccupation with the more intimate 
 relationships between men and women, a pre- 
 occupation present even in Emperor and Galilean, 
 was fostered by Susanna and Marie Thoresen. 
 
 After his marriage Ibsen's financial position 
 became serious. He left Bergen — where his 
 salary had been £67 10s. a year — and returned 
 to Christiania. The theatrical world at Chris- 
 tiania was just beginning to feel the growth of 
 the Norwegian national movement ; and a 
 " Norwegian Theatre " was started in opposition 
 to the Christiania Theatre which was conducted 
 under Danish management. To this theatre 
 Ibsen was appointed director at a salary of 
 £135. This, although an improvement, was 
 still but a poor income for a man with a wife 
 and a son ; and the bankruptcy of the theatre in 
 1862 made things more serious for the poet. In 
 January 1863 Ibsen petitioned the Government 
 for a grant of £90 a year. This was refused in 
 March of that year, but in May Ibsen, em- 
 boldened by the fact that Bjornson had been 
 granted £90 in March, applied again, this time 
 asking — was he measuring his achievements or 
 his necessities against his colleague's? — for £160. 
 His application was successful, although the 
 Government,' in acceding to it in September 
 
 22 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 1863, reduced the salary, or travelling-pension, 
 to the £90 originally asked for. With this 
 Ibsen, in the spring of 1864, went to Rome, 
 where he was to live for four years. 
 
 Small as this endowment may seem now to 
 us, looking back on the work of Ibsen it must 
 be admitted that the Government did well in 
 thus giving their country's greatest genius the 
 chance of development, the means for that 
 change of circumstance and scene which made 
 him able to realize and to visualize more 
 acutely the beauty of the country he left, the 
 character of its people, the colour of its scenery, 
 the strength and weakness of its nature. The 
 pictures of Norwegian life and country, in their 
 breadth and their detail, with which Brand and 
 Peer Gynt are crammed, have just that touch 
 of surprised discovery, of awakened recognition 
 which distance from a familiar object often 
 gives to the creative artist ; absence, acting on 
 the alert intellect, establishes an acuter memory, 
 a keener vision than can be had, at least by 
 critical natures, in the midst of known and 
 loved surroundings. Under the sun and heat 
 of Italy, through the haze of purple hills and 
 green-brown Campagna, against the Alban hills 
 and over the deep waters of the Mediterranean, 
 Ibsen saw a mirage of his Norwegian home, and 
 gave us those incomparable pictures, firm in 
 
 23 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 outline, vivid in their contrasted colouring, in 
 which Brand and Agnes, Peer Gynt, Ase and 
 Solveig live and agonize. 
 
 Two plays — of different value and nature — 
 were published before Ibsen left Christiania, 
 Love's Coviedy and The Pretenders, and a long 
 narrative poem On the Heights. In the bio- 
 graphical letter already quoted Ibsen wrote : 
 " Not until I was married did more serious 
 interests take hold of my life," but I think we 
 should lay an emphasis on "take hold " ; he can- 
 not have thought that his marriage did more 
 than encourage that vein in him which is con- 
 spicuous in parts of Lady Inger and of The 
 Vikings at Helgeland. Love's Comedy brought 
 the conventional people about its author's ears, 
 and The Pretenders, written, as was afterwards 
 An Enemy of the People, to express the mood 
 aroused by his enemies' attacks, remains the 
 finest and most magistral of his Norwegian 
 historical plays. 
 
 When, with his pension, Ibsen left Scandi- 
 navia for Italy, it was not only his country that 
 he left, but his country in a crisis which had 
 exposed her national weakness. The poverty 
 and pusillanimity of the help given to Denmark 
 by her stronger neighbours filled the poet's heart 
 with a fury that expressed itself with bitterness 
 in poems and letters. 
 
 24 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 So when Ibsen left for Italy he left in a 
 berserk rage. He was no soldier, and yet all 
 his life he was a poet of war, of strength, 
 of defiance; all his life the fighter for the 
 few, the singer of the man-against-odds, the 
 foe of the big bully, the hater of that force, in 
 states or individuals, which subdues by a vast, 
 disgusting inertia. When in that summer of 
 1864 he tried to turn his attention to things 
 of the past, to Italy, to Greece, to Rome, he 
 found that at Rome or at Ariccia memory was 
 stronger than vision, and instead of writing his 
 Julianus Apostata he turned aside and, amid 
 the cypresses, the myrtles, the olives, wrote that 
 poem of ice and steel-grey mountains. Brand. 
 Here in Rome, the Rome of the Papal States, 
 " the only place that enjoys true liberty — 
 freedom from the political liberty-tyranny," 
 Ibsen could recall the slave-ridden state of his 
 manhood, the false freedom of Norway ; and at 
 Ariccia he saw Skien more vividly than ever 
 before. " Never have I seen the Home and its 
 life so fully, so clearly, so closely as precisely 
 from a distance and in absence," are his own 
 words which explain in some sort the sculptured 
 detail of his first great work. 
 
 With the publication of Brand in 1865 Ibsen 
 takes his place, with Bjornson, as the most con- 
 siderable figure, both for promise and perform- 
 
 25 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 ance, in Norwegian literature. The success of 
 the play did nothing to turn the poet's head : he 
 knew that the people who applauded were forced 
 to do it not so much because of the good in them 
 as because of the manner in which his drama 
 appealed to that good. He was still, in Brand, 
 susceptible of being pushed into the traditional 
 categories ; he spoke not only of religion, but of 
 theology, not merely of God, but of priests ; and 
 while no doubt some saw in Brand at any rate a 
 degree of the sheer ideal force of the poem, for 
 the majority its appeal was along lines that we 
 can only parallel in England by the astounding 
 success of such a book as Robert Elsmere. 
 Brand has just enough of the tone of the pulpit 
 to win for it that enthusiastic recognition which 
 congregations give to a popular preacher, even 
 when he castigates them for their meaner offences. 
 But Ibsen gave no encouragement to his fol- 
 lowers ; never has a great man less deserved 
 the curse of greatness, parasites. His next book, 
 and his greatest, is in entire contrast to the 
 grave form, the splendid and sombre lines of his 
 tragedy. He broke upon his growing reputa- 
 tion with the publication of Peer Gynt. 
 
 It is very easy for us to-day to see how Peer 
 Gynt correlates Brand ; it is even easier to see 
 how much finer this great, loose, apparently 
 formless poem is. Here in the cant of to-day 
 
 26 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 was true " expressionist " art ; there is no mood, 
 no thought of Man the vagrant that is not 
 rendered in Peer Gynt. It is the largest, the 
 most unrivalled thing in drama since Shake- 
 speare wrote Hamlet. But it was too much for 
 the critics. Brandes, although he admitted that 
 he found a depth of thought and a richness of 
 poetry unmatched in Ibsen's previous work, 
 found some of it incomprehensible, and more of 
 it witless, and accuses Ibsen of allowing allegory 
 — of which there is none at all in the play — to 
 sap the power of the poetry. And as if this 
 were not enough, Brandes finds the basis of the 
 play to be "contempt for humanity and self- 
 hatred," this the basis of the drama that con- 
 tains Solveig's immortal retort : 
 
 " In my faith, in my hope, in my love wert thou ! " 
 
 Peer Gynt was published in 1867. In May 
 1868 Ibsen left Rome. While he was there he 
 had never quite dismissed from his mind the 
 fascinating, tired figure of Julian called Apos- 
 tate. He had begun a poem — so he wrote to 
 Bjomson in 1864 — on the Emperor ; but this 
 was never finished ; and the great play he 
 finally wrote was probably not begun even 
 when he left Rome. He went to Munich by 
 way of Florence and Southern Bavaria, and 
 then in the autumn went on to Dresden. Here 
 
 27 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 the sight of northern things and people drove 
 from his mind the friend of Gregory and the 
 rival of Libanius ; and his reconstruction of the 
 death-struggles of philosophic paganism had to 
 wait while he carefully proceeded to destroy the 
 sham " liberalism " of his native country. The 
 League of Youth, issued in 1869, is an enter- 
 taining play ; it is light, ironic, and achieves the 
 topical success aimed at. It does more than 
 this, it contains for always good satiric material 
 against those who insist upon confusing party 
 with patriotism, God with the "godly," and it 
 should still be serviceable for those who desire 
 to show what dangers lurk in the uncontrolled 
 adoption of the party system. The issue of the 
 play had the odd effect of making his fellow- 
 countrymen rank Ibsen with the Conservatives, 
 a mistake only remedied when twelve years 
 later he published Ghosts. No doubt he was 
 claimed for one party because the other abused 
 him ; and the fact that, apparently uncon- 
 sciously, he had parodied certain of Bjornson's 
 peculiarities in his picture of Stensgard added 
 to his sin in the eyes of the political liberals. 
 Bjomson himself took offence, much to Ibsen's 
 grief; the opposition of the rest gratified and 
 encouraged him, as opposition was always to do. 
 Two years later, still resident at Dresden, 
 Ibsen issued a collection of his Poems ; and in 
 
 28 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 1873 the long labour with Julian was over, and 
 his last great romantic achievement — romantic, 
 that is, in method, for Ibsen is never really 
 romantic in thought — was issued. Into Emperor 
 and Galilean Ibsen put far more of his convic- 
 tion and beliefs than into any other play ; far 
 more, that is, of his deliberately held conviction. 
 Often afterwards he echoes its ideas, particularly 
 the idea of a Third Kingdom, the kingdom that 
 Montanus the charlatan proclaimed and Joachim 
 the dreamer predicted, the Kingdom of the 
 Spirit, that was to see the great reconciliation 
 when " What is, is not and what is not, is."* 
 
 After the publication of Emperor and Galilean 
 — it is worth mentioning here that it was the 
 first play of Ibsen's to be translated into English 
 by Miss Catherine Ray in 1876, four years after 
 the issue of Mr. Gosse's article on Ibsen in The 
 Spectator — the poet took an unwonted rest from 
 composition. In 1874 he revisited, after an 
 absence of ten years, the country which had 
 now hailed him as a great poet : his plays were 
 being more and more acted. In a letter of 
 August 1873 he talks of "re- writing Lady 
 
 ' Did Ibsen borrow tbis phrase of Maximus from tbe apocryphal 
 word of Our Lord, reported by Clement of Alexandria in his 
 Stromata ? " When what is, is not ; when that which is without is 
 as that which is within ; the male with the female, neither male 
 nor female." It seems likely ; but it is curious that Maximus 
 should omit the more arresting sentences— his phrase is but the 
 porch of the temple. 
 
 29 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Inger" ; he corresponded with Grieg over the 
 music for Peer Gynt, which was staged, in 
 an acting version, in 1876, In 1875 he revised 
 his early work Catalina ; but it is not till the 
 close of that year that he can write to Hegel, 
 his publisher, that he has finished the first act 
 of his new play. This new play was, however, 
 still to take some time, and The Pillars of Society 
 was not issued till the autumn of 1877. The 
 Pillars of Society was a great theatrical success, 
 and Ibsen from this time, no doubt with occa- 
 sional regrets, devoted himself to prose drama. 
 His exterior life remained uneventful. He had 
 left Dresden in 1875 for Munich ; thence he 
 took a year's holiday in Rome from the autumn 
 of 1878, and he only returned to Munich to find 
 he could not desert Italy, could not forsake 
 Rome, even though, since the capture of the 
 Papal States, the great city was now "taken 
 away from human beings and given to the poli- 
 ticians." After little more than six months at 
 Munich he returned to the city where he had 
 begun A Doll's House. For that play, in the 
 popular mind more associated with its author's 
 name than any other, was written, partly at 
 Rome, and partly at Amalfi, in his holiday of 
 1879. Ibsen was keenly sensitive to place, and 
 if we would get the utmost feeling out of his 
 plays we must remember how large a part was 
 
 30 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 played by fortunate or unfortunate position and 
 circumstances in contributing to the wonderful 
 " atmosphere " of the dramas. The real gaiety 
 of A Doll's House owes not a little, I believe, 
 to the inspirations which made its author write 
 in Italy rather than in Bavaria : Nora has the 
 true Ughtness of Asti, while she might — who 
 knows? — have had the darker and dingier hue 
 of the famous Munich breweries. 
 
 Two years after A Doll's House, Ibsen pub- 
 lished Grkosts. It was written at Sorrento, 
 where he had written Peer Gynt, and it suffered 
 from equal misinterpretations. But Peer Gynt 
 was poetic, wilful, fantastic ; Ghosts was hard, 
 " prosaic," clear. Its meaning was evident, so 
 thought its enemies ; it preached Nihilism, 
 atheism (not yet was Ibsenism invented), it was 
 godless, obscene, disgusting. The reconciled 
 Bjornson declared it was Ibsen's noblest deed ; 
 Georg Brandes hailed it as "an imperishable 
 glory," and Ibsen himself, in a private letter, 
 modestly admitted that " he thought the time 
 had come to move a few boundary posts." He 
 moved them so effectually that for more than 
 a year the play was unacted, and in England 
 it shares with The Cenci, Monva Vanna, 
 and Mrs. Warren's Profession the honour of 
 the Censor's ban. What Ibsen thought of his 
 opponents he told in a fairly plain dramatic 
 
 31 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 allegory, published the next year, An Enemy 
 of the People. The note of this play, "the 
 minority is always right," had been stated by 
 Ibsen ten years before in a private letter, when 
 he calls it " his fundamental principle in every 
 range and domain," and says there is no fear 
 that he will ever have to surrender it. Nor did 
 he, for, as he wrote to Brandes, " at the point 
 where I stood when I wrote each of my books 
 there now stands a fairly compact multitude ; 
 but I myself am there no longer, I am else- 
 where, and, I hope, further ahead." 
 
 From this time imtil the publication of John 
 Gabriel Borkman Ibsen produced a play every 
 two years with a regularity that nothing was 
 allowed to interrupt. His external life has 
 nothing of particular interest : aU in it — such 
 as his friendship for the girl who was model for 
 Hilda Wangel — that was of importance found 
 its way, quintesseivced, into the plays. No 
 doubt had there been a Boswell, Ibsen's life 
 might prove to be to the full as rich in incident, 
 material and spiritual, as that of any man of 
 his time ; but the few " intimate " books there 
 are, the Correspondence, Paulsen's Samliv med 
 Ibsen, Jaeger's Life, reveal but little except 
 those personal traits whose significance to the 
 reader is largely dependent on previous know- 
 ledge of the hero's character. That Ibsen was 
 
 32 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 secretive in his methods of work ; that he sewed 
 his own buttons on (and did the work badly) ; 
 that he advised Paulsen to black his own boots 
 and lay his own fires ; that he ordered Emilie 
 Bardach (Hilda's prototype) to stop correspond- 
 ing with him — all this gossip depends for its value 
 largely on the character of the relaters, still more 
 on the character we assign to Henrik Ibsen. 
 
 The joyous defiance of The Enemy of the 
 People was followed by the poetic cynicism of 
 The Wild Duck, planned and begun at Rome 
 and finished at Gossensass, in the Tyrol, in 
 September 1884. It is noteworthy as the play 
 in which Ibsen allows the poet in him to con- 
 quer again ; poetry is never absent — not even, 
 I think, from The Pillars of Society — but from 
 now Ibsen has effected a reconciliation between 
 the diamond hardness of his method and the 
 strong poetry of his message: he achieves in 
 The Wild Duck a new thing, an eifect which 
 Mr, Archer (writing of other plays) has very 
 happily compared to Hawthorne's, but which 
 excels Hawthorne by its sheer reality, its in- 
 comparable insistence on the inevitable rightness 
 of the spiritual, of its appearance in such un- 
 likely guises as Gina or Relling. 
 
 In April 1885 Ibsen writes to his publisher 
 that he is following "political events in Den- 
 mark with eager interest " ; in the summer of 
 c 33 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 that year he visited Norway and was left with 
 the impression that the country " was inhabited 
 not by two million human beings, but by two 
 million cats and dogs." We get the result of 
 his gloomy forebodings of the political life of 
 Norway in Rosmersholm, which he wrote at 
 Munich in the year 1886, and published at the 
 end of November. We may notice the depress- 
 ing eiFect that a near vision of Norwegian 
 politics always gave Ibsen ; Rosmersholm is full, 
 not of the sturdy defiance of earlier plays and 
 poems, but of a heavy melancholy which, while 
 it does not obscure, certainly softens the out- 
 lines of the poet's own steadfast and lofty ideals. 
 His next play is of a' very different type. It 
 is, with the exception of The Master JBuilder, 
 the most beautiful of the prose dramas. Inspired 
 by the longing for the sea, which is so often 
 characteristic of those who have the blood of 
 sea-folk in their veins and recollections of the 
 sea about their youth. The Lady from the Sea is 
 the most winning, the most gracious of Ibsen's 
 later plays. It is not false to nature, it has 
 plenty of salt to its sentiment, and humour to its 
 humanity, but in the tender and exquisite pic- 
 ture of EUida Ibsen has given us a portrait of a 
 woman which even he, in his splendid gallery, 
 never bettered. EUida might be Solveig ana- 
 lysed — but analysed with how loving a touch, 
 
 34 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 how unerring a kindness ; it is as if a great sur- 
 geon were operating on a woman he loved, 
 and sheer love, we feel, as well as consummate 
 skill compels the success of the operation. 
 
 The next play, Hedda Gabler, illustrates once 
 more Ibsen's tendency to revolt. / Grant Allen 
 said, " Hedda is nothing more nor less than the 
 girl we take down to dinner in London nineteen 
 times out of twenty,"/ and the feelings of an 
 average man for his partner at a dinner party 
 are generally neither deep nor particularly true. 
 Hedda Gabler, with its disgusting Judge Brack 
 and its incompetent Tesman, is only saved from 
 complete hardness by Thea Elvsted, whose char- 
 acter, according to Dr. Julius Elias,was borrowed, 
 like Hilda Wangel's, from Emilie Bardach. This 
 girl of seventeen, whom Ibsen met at Gossensass 
 in the summer of 1889, certainly had her in- 
 fluence on the poet of sixty-one. Ibsen's letters 
 to her have been published. " He cannot re- 
 press his summer memories " ; he cannot work 
 at Hedda, because across his vision comes his 
 summer experience demanding poetical expres- 
 sion — demanding, no doubt, its castle in the air. 
 If Hilda Wangel is at all a true picture of 
 EmiUe Bardach I do not think that we need feel 
 that either Ibsen or his " model " suffered at all 
 from the friendship. Dr. Elias was told by 
 Ibsen that his young Viennese friend "did not 
 
 35 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 care a bit about marrying a well-brought-up 
 young man. What tempted and charmed her 
 was luring other people's husbands." She would 
 have made him " her booty " ; but " she did not 
 get hold of me, I got hold of her — for my play." 
 With all this, Ibsen thought Emilie Bardach 
 " had a great deal of heart and womanly under- 
 standing." I think it is possible to take this too 
 seriously. A girl of seventeen would naturally 
 be flattered at being allowed to chatter to one 
 of the masters of the world's literature, and 
 there is no reason to suppose that Ibsen de- 
 ceived her any more than she deceived him. 
 After all Ibsen felt that he had escaped, and his 
 model — well, did she not get the most beautiful 
 castle ever given to woman, that incomparable 
 play, Bygmester Solness — The Master Builder! 
 The episode is of great interest because it had 
 this effect on the dramatist : from that summer 
 in Gossensass every play he wrote deals with the 
 problem, foreshadowed in Brand and Peer 
 Gynt, of the relation between love and the 
 world, between life and art, between woman 
 and man. In The Master Builder woman is 
 triumphant. In Little Eyolf man and woman 
 is each baffled, and only the eyes of the dead 
 child mirror the victory missed. In John 
 Grabriel Borkman the woman is wasted and the 
 man is broken. In When We Dead Awaken the 
 
 36 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 woman is used, used successfully and beauti- 
 fully ; but the man spoils his success, and Ibsen 
 only achieves a solution, if solution it be, by 
 bringing to the aid of the deserted woman and 
 the disillusioned man the tremendous forces of 
 Nature and God. So Emilie Bardach had her 
 kingdom : she deserves to be gratefully remem- 
 bered by all lovers of poetry in that she, so far 
 as we know, drove the great dramatist back 
 to deal more exclusively with the problem 
 that he, more than any other, understood 
 and could present in the characters of his 
 creating. 
 
 There is really nothing to tell of the last years 
 of Ibsen's life except that, until his final illness, 
 his forces show no signs of diminution ; for I 
 cannot agree with the opinion that puts his last 
 play in a definitely inferior position to his other 
 work. He left Munich in 1891, and The Master 
 Builder was written at Christiania, where the 
 poet was to live for the rest of his life. His re- 
 turn to Scandinavia — but not, as he had hoped, 
 to the sea — may in part be responsible for the 
 increasing gloom of his three final plays. In 
 them the " younger generation " is either hard 
 and unlovely, or broken-winged and futile : the 
 older generation is, with the exception of Ella 
 Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman, not only 
 baffled but bitter. When Ibsen said good-bye 
 
 37 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 to Emilie Bardach at Gossensass, he gave her a 
 photograph on which he wrote "An die Mai- 
 sonne eines Septemberlebens," — "To the May- 
 sunshine of a September life." That September 
 Ufe may be said to have passed rapidly indeed to 
 December. Autumn, it is true, lingers in Little 
 Eyolf; but in John Gabriel Borkman and When 
 We Dead Awaken the snow in which each of 
 them ends is a fitting symbol of the wintry 
 atmosphere of the plays. 
 
 Little Eyolf was issued at Copenhagen in the 
 December of 1894 ; in 1896 came John Gabriel 
 Borkman, which in strength of method is equal 
 to all but the greatest of the previous plays ; 
 and three years later was issued When We 
 Dead Awaken, a dramatic epilogue which con- 
 cluded the series that began with The Master 
 Builder. It was also to conclude its author's 
 dramatic work. Although in March 1900 he 
 could still look forward to writing another play 
 "with new weapons and in new armour," his 
 hope was never to be fulfilled. With the new 
 century Ibsen's fatal illness began, and on May 
 24th, 1906, he died. 
 
 Byron, writing from Ravenna to Thomas 
 Moore, tells him that a certain Mr. Coolidge, an 
 American, had called on him, and that he liked his 
 visitor. "I expect," the poet goes on, " he did not 
 
 38 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 take quite so much to me, from his having ex- 
 pected to meet a misanthropical gentleman, in 
 wolf-skin breeches, and conversing in fierce 
 monosyllables, instead of a man of this world. 
 I can never get people to understand that 
 poetry is the expression of excited passion, 
 and that there is no such a thing as a life of 
 passion any more than a continuous earthquake, 
 or an eternal fever. Besides who could ever 
 shave themselves in such a state ? " 
 
 The world, particularly that small part of it 
 which jackals men of genius, is still prone to 
 forget that the poet is not always in a passion. 
 It is true that some bad poets have lent them- 
 selves to the delusion by adopting in their ap- 
 pearance and manner a sombre dignity quite un- 
 suspected from their works. This, if it occurs in 
 good poets, is but a fault of youth ; and no great 
 poet ever professed to act as well as to write 
 his more passionate works. Certainly to " the 
 overstrained women " (as Mrs. Ibsen called 
 them) who wrote to the author of A Doll's 
 House, Henrik Ibsen must have proved as dis- 
 concerting an idol as was Robert Browning to 
 his more foolish admirers. Ibsen as a young man 
 had a reputation as a Bohemian, but his connec- 
 tions with " non-reputable " life, political or 
 social, were never, I fancy, very many or very 
 serious. The prospect of imprisonment in 1851, 
 
 39 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 when he was concerned with the Norwegian 
 working-men's movement (or rather with its 
 leaders) alarmed him considerably, and his sub- 
 sequent sympathy for the movement did not 
 take the shape of sharing the risks attendant on 
 its prosecution. Nor do I say he was wrong. 
 He knew that his real work lay far apart from 
 parties and party-conflict ; and we ought, I 
 think, to give him praise for going so far as he 
 did in sharing his friends' plans rather than 
 blame him for not pursuing a course of action 
 quite unnatural to him, the arch-individualist 
 and aristocrat. 
 
 After the publication of Brand Ibsen, always 
 aristocratic at heart, became aristocratic in ap- 
 pearance; Mr. Archer says he looked like a 
 distinguished diplomat. His real affection for 
 " honours," eagles, and stars, and crosses, testifies 
 to this same strain in his temperament ; he be- 
 longed really to that age of the arts when the artist, 
 merely because of his art, is given a share in the 
 government or the direction of affairs. It is in 
 Rosmersholm we have our clearest view of Ibsen's 
 political views, and Rosmer with his scheme for 
 " ennobling " is really a Platonist, echoing Plato's 
 demand that the philosopher should rule, echo- 
 ing Plato's claim that the man who thinks best 
 does best. 
 
 Beneath this correct, diplomatic, reserved ex- 
 40 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 terior what kind of a character was there ? It 
 is difficult to say. The materials are unsatisfac- 
 tory, scanty and at times contradictory. But 
 there are certain traits that stand out unmistak- 
 ably. 
 
 First, there is Ibsen's astounding tendency to 
 complete self-sufficiency. He knew it as a 
 danger, and it was balanced in him — as we can 
 see from the account of his wife already quoted 
 — by his passionate interest in his fellow-creatures 
 and his real capacity for aifection. Still, in spite 
 of the defensive letter written to his uncle, Ibsen's 
 relations towards his family must be counted 
 as a weakness in him. He deliberately cut him- 
 self off. It is true he had to earn his own living 
 from the age of fifteen, but this, though perhaps 
 the fault of his father, was certainly not the 
 desire of his parents. It was inevitable that 
 Ibsen should leave his home ; but there was no 
 need surely that the breach — he wrote no letters 
 to his family except to his married sister Hedwig 
 — should have been so complete as it was. Evi- 
 dently Ibsen had his misgivings ; when he writes 
 to Christian Paus, his uncle, on the news of his 
 father's death, he explains that he did not write 
 to his parents because he could send them no 
 money; "it seemed to me idle to write when 
 I could not act." Never, surely, did anyone 
 make a lamer apology for neglecting the claims 
 
 41 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 of affection ; it would be better to say nothing 
 than to say this. 
 
 This harshness never quite deserted Ibsen ; but 
 it certainly lessened as he revised his philosophy 
 and saw more clearly that where he had put duty 
 he must put love ; that the demands of love 
 are really not external at all, but merely one form 
 of the manifestation of spiritual life. Against 
 this egotism, too, we must put that side of his 
 character which is evidenced by his marriage, by 
 his subsequent relation to his wife and his sister- 
 in-law, and by his capacity for forming new 
 friendships, of which the best example we have 
 is the episode with Emilie. It is not, perhaps, 
 fantastic to say that these two sides of his 
 character have their parallel in his work. In 
 its consummate form, its absolute rightness, its 
 sureness of method we have the man who knew 
 exactly what he wanted, and was bound to get 
 it in spite of everything ; the man who was 
 possessed with such full-blooded " egoism " that 
 it " forced him for a time to regard what con- 
 cerned himself as the only thing of any con- 
 sequence, and everything else as non-existent " : 
 while in the lover and husband and friend we 
 can see the artist who, almost in spite of himself, 
 adds to the beauty of form, the beauty of colour 
 and shadow, and finally lets the creatures of his 
 will have their share, in their symbol and sugges- 
 
 42 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 tion, in building plays that are not only con- 
 summate dramas but lyrical poems of the most 
 poignant appeal. 
 
 It was the mystic and poet in Ibsen that kept 
 him from allying himself with parties and sects 
 and movements. It is astonishing how clear he 
 is from all the nineteenth-century cant — the cant 
 of rationalism, the cant of convention, the cant 
 of liberty, the cant of commercial and political 
 prosperity. His poetry and his humour are effec- 
 tive solvents of all the " intellectual " rubbish 
 from which the Scandinavian liberal move- 
 ment suffered. Here his letters to Brandes are 
 the most informing documents. He argues 
 against Brandes' belief in political liberty. " The 
 state is the curse of the individual. With what 
 is the strength of Prussia as a state bought? 
 With the merging of the individual in the 
 political and geographical concept. The waiter 
 makes the best soldier. Now turn to the Jewish 
 people, the nobility of the human race. How 
 has it preserved itself — isolated, poetical — despite 
 all the barbarity from without ? Because it had 
 no state to burden it. . . . Make willingness and 
 spiritual kinship the only essentials in the case 
 of a union, and you have the beginnings of a 
 liberty that is of some value." It is odd to notice 
 how near Ibsen gets in his views on the state 
 to the Voluntaryist Creed of the late Auberon 
 
 43 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Herbert ; and, like Mr. Herbert, he does not take 
 sufficient account of the vast part played by social 
 inertia in most people's lives, or rather he assumes 
 that this inertia is always a bad influence. Nor 
 is his citation of the Jews really sound. What has 
 kept Judaism together has been not only race 
 unity, but the stronger bond of a very definite 
 religion buttressed by very definite ritual duties. 
 Ibsen may have suspected this in demanding 
 " spiritual kinship " as an essential for union, but 
 I doubt if he ever recognized the enormous 
 power for good that institutional religion can be : 
 or, what is still more important, that most men 
 must have some general political or ecclesiastical 
 body by which their spirit may enjoy the exer- 
 cise of true freedom. For Ibsen, with con- 
 sequences on his'work that I shall consider later, 
 fi:eedom almost invariably implies revolt : and 
 if there is nothing external to revolt against, a 
 man must rebel against a certain side of himself. 
 Ibsen's idea of life is that of the surgeon, not of 
 the physician ; and in a period which was drowsy 
 with the drugs of indifferent doctors, it is this 
 fact which gives his life its significance and 
 value. 
 
 Ibsen was one of those rare men who, without 
 effort, are enabled to keep ahead of the life bf 
 their time. No doubt he lost something by his 
 unwillingness to read modern literature ; but he 
 
 44 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 was rightly impatient of the over-cultured tone of 
 the self-styled liberals of Europe. He saw that 
 too great attention to books and theories was 
 blinding people to the real men and women who 
 were presenting life in a way that knew no rules of 
 text-book, and could only with difficulty submit 
 to analysis. Brandes was once incautious enough 
 to send his friend a translation of Mill's Utilitar- 
 ianism: and this was the thanks he got : " I can't 
 imagine why you took the trouble to trans- 
 late this work : the sage-like Philistinism of it 
 recalls Cicero and Seneca. I'm certain you 
 could have written a book ten times as good in 
 half the time the translation must have taken 
 you. And I believe you are doing Stuart Mill 
 a gross injustice when you doubt the truth of his 
 assertion that he got all his ideas from his wife!" 
 There is no evidence that Ibsen despised ordi- 
 nary learning. Indeed he seems to have re- 
 garded his own inability to get much out of 
 books as a disadvantage ; and certainly in so far 
 that it delayed due recognition of his greatness 
 among the slower academic judges of literature, 
 he did lose something. But what is a loss like 
 this compared with the gain in freshness, in 
 audacity, in clearness and strength of treat- 
 ment that Ibsen's freedom from literary bias 
 gave him ? The technique of his craft he knew 
 as no other dramatist knew it : and a knowledge 
 
 45 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 of technique is the only lesson that a supreme 
 artist should learn consciously from his pre- 
 decessors. 
 
 The more one reads of Ibsen's life, and then 
 of his plays, the more certain does the truth 
 stand out that he got himself, all the best and 
 truest of him, into his work. Whether he felt 
 that he had been too hardT in his use of life for 
 art it is not easy to decide : the acute pre- 
 occupation with the problem of life against art, 
 a preoccupation so noticeable in his last four 
 plays, may be appealed to as evidence that Ibsen 
 felt he had lost something : that he, like Rubek, 
 had killed Love in his effort to create works of 
 art : but we must beware of forcing the drama- 
 tist into the position of any of his characters. 
 What can be said with confidence is this : that 
 Ibsen from his youth on saw clearly that nothing 
 was of so much importance in life as true personal 
 relationship, vivid and candid contact between 
 husband and wife, father and son, friend and 
 friend. Whether he felt this because he had 
 found it the greatest thing in his own life ; or 
 whether he had learnt the truth by missing the 
 experience, is not, at any rate for the present, 
 possible to discover. Nor indeed does it much 
 matter. We know clearly enough what his 
 ideals were ; and his personal struggles, his 
 failure or success do not concern us so much 
 
 46 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 as his great record of those other fighters, in 
 picturing whose struggles he shows so plainly on 
 which side he stands, in what army he was 
 enrolled. However little we may be willing to 
 identify Ibsen with this or that character, or to 
 read into his life their opinions or circumstances, 
 this we may always say: he was always in 
 sympathy with the fighter. Nothing roused 
 or pleased him so much as opposition. It is 
 perhaps the quality, mean as it is, of fight in 
 Hedda Gabler that forced Ibsen to make her, 
 even, tolerable. His passion for conflict was a 
 generous passion to be understood, to break his 
 way into the thick armies of prejudice, ignor- 
 ance and hate : and it is this which made 
 people defend him so vehemently, and as vehe- 
 mently attack. To-day, now that we can see 
 more clearly how predominant was the artist in 
 Ibsen, even in his quarrels, while still appreciating 
 his magnificent combativeness we can appraise it 
 more rightly as part of the equipment that put 
 him, for so many years, at the head of European 
 dramatists. 
 
 47 
 
II 
 
 THE POEMS: HISTORICAL PLAYS: 
 LOVE'S COMEDY 
 
 The Poet's essential task is to see, not to reflect. 1871. 
 Everything which I have created as a poet has had its birth in a 
 frame of mind and in a situation in life. 1870. 
 
 Ibsen always thought of himself as a poet. I 
 am not here concerned to defend the principle, 
 sound as it seems to me, that the word " poetry " 
 in Erlglish should be kept to signify literature in 
 which regular rhythm, of a recurrent kind, is 
 one of the most important parts. Prose has its 
 own glory and its own realm : supremely good 
 prose is as rare as' supremely good poetry, the 
 prose-writer should be too proud to borrow the 
 word "poetry" for the best effects of his own 
 medium. Still, it would be pedantic not to 
 admit that there are some authors whose proper 
 medium is poetry ; that is, they naturally express, 
 intensely, by vision or symbol rather than by 
 analysis and illustration. Such a man, what- 
 ever his actual medium is, will never succeed in 
 ridding himself of that curious, direct beauty 
 which is the note of poetry : he will always re- 
 veal rather than explain, he will plant a rose 
 while another is describing one. 
 
 48 
 
THE POEMS 
 
 This note of the poet Ibsen never quite lost. 
 In his early lyrics it is as evident as the promise 
 in them of later ideas and conceptions. Of the 
 beauty of his poems none save those who can 
 read Danish can form any adequate notion : 
 there are no translations that do not rob the 
 originals of at least half their effect. I can only 
 quote one of the most characteristic in the hope 
 that something in the version may tempt a 
 reader to turn to the original. 
 
 " Mine-wall ! crash and crashing break 
 At the heavy strokes I make ! 
 On until the ore's deep singing 
 Echoes back my hammer's ringing. 
 
 " In the mountain's depth of night 
 Still there calls the treasure's light — 
 Diamonds and jewels holden 
 In the mine's veins^ red and golden. 
 
 " In the deep is peace, ah ! peace 
 Of the eternal wilderness — 
 Break the way, my hammer ! Enter 
 To the hidden mystery's centre. 
 
 " Once I sat a merry lad 
 'Neath the heavens star-yclad,' 
 Spring's gay path my feet were pressing, 
 Youth's sweet peace my soul possessing. 
 
 " But I lost the glorious day 
 In the midnight's sombre ray. 
 Lost the hillside's song divine in 
 The aisles and chancels of the mining. 
 
 D 49 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 " When I first came here I said 
 (Foolish child !) ' The riddle's read ! 
 The deep's spirit holds for me 
 The clue to life's long mystery.' 
 
 " Ah ! No spirit has explain' d 
 Things that puzzled me and pain'd ; 
 Ah ! no ray of light has risen 
 Upwards from this earthy prison. 
 
 " Have I fail'd, then ? Will my way 
 Never lead to clearer day ? 
 Yet the light of upper skies 
 Blinds and dazzles still mine eyes. 
 
 " Nayj still down ! I must not cease : 
 There is the eternal peace. 
 Break the way, my hammer ! Enter 
 To the hidden mystery's centre ! 
 
 " Stroke on stroke I smite my way 
 Onwards until life's last day. 
 Not a glimpse of morn surprises : 
 Not a ray of hope uprises." 
 
 In the volume of Digte with which Ibsen's 
 collected work begins there is every variety of 
 verse : occasional, satiric, narrative, purely lyrical 
 and mystical. There are signs in many of the 
 poems of ideas that he subsequently treated in 
 his dramas ; but his verse, which is most of it 
 early work, contains no hint that I can dis- 
 cover of his preoccupation with the problems of 
 marriage and of human relationship, although 
 his philosophy of Will is foreshadowed in that 
 
 50 
 
THE POEMS 
 
 grim poem Pa Viddei'ne. After he had once 
 decided on the drama as his proper method 
 Ibsen's poems were infrequent and unimportant ; 
 there is, however, one which has a pecuhar in- 
 terest of its own. It is the key-lyric to The 
 Master Builder, and was written as late as 1892. 
 
 " There in the cosy house, the twain, they dwell 
 
 Through the long autumns and the wild Decembers — 
 The house burnt down. All to sheer rubbish fell. 
 The twain must grope, must grope among the embers. 
 
 " For in the embers is a jewel lying 
 Hidden, a jewel fire can never hurt. 
 If each search faithfully, there's no denying 
 That he or she may find it 'mid the dirt. 
 
 " But if they find it, if — those burnt-out twain, — 
 This precious jewel fire cannot destroy. 
 Never shall she find her burnt faith again ; 
 Never will he discover his burnt joy." 
 
 It is not my intention, however, to linger over 
 Ibsen's minor poems. Beautiful as many of 
 them are in form, there is nothing in them which 
 he did not say with equal emphasis and generally 
 equal success in his later or mature work : and 
 for the exegesis of Ibsen a knowledge of the 
 poems, though useful, is by no means absolutely 
 necessary. 
 
 The plays dealing with saga-subjects, or with 
 Norwegian history, cannot be dismissed quite so 
 quickly. We need not take Ibsen's own declara- 
 
 51 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 tion " not until my marriage did more serious 
 interests take possession of my life " quite liter- 
 ally: people in love are a little too apt to be 
 unable to distinguish between cause and coinci- 
 dence ; frequently the marriage which the lover 
 takes as the cause of a particular change is only 
 one sign of it. Ibsen at the period of his mar- 
 riage was evidently arriving, slowly but surely, 
 at those philosophic conclusions which, always in 
 poetical form, are to manifest themselves in his 
 work. He found love and marriage helped him 
 to realize himself and his task, and I would be 
 the last to minimize the extent of that help ; but 
 we may be sure that it was not in Ibsen to go on 
 writing ordinary " costume " or historical plays 
 with an occasional hint of spiritual and realistic 
 truth. Some change was inevitable ; and although 
 his marriage may have definitely settled the lines 
 of that change, he was working towards them 
 before he even met Susanna Thoresen. 
 
 His first play of importance. Lady Inger of 
 Ostrat, except in its handling of the contrasted 
 characters of Lady Inger and Elina her daughter, 
 has little sign of the future Ibsen. It is a good, 
 sombre and unrelenting drama, far more Greek 
 in feeling than Norwegian, if we take the sagas 
 as the type of Norwegian heroic literature ; for 
 it has all the Greek feeling of fate, and little of 
 the Scandinavian atmosphere of defiance. Nyls 
 
 52 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 
 
 Lykke, the villain, half libertine and half traitor, 
 shows a little of the hand that afterwards drew 
 Peer Gynt, but the play as a whole, strong as it 
 is, is no more typical of Ibsen in its characters 
 than in its ideas. The Feast at Solhaug has 
 really no qualities that need detain us : its 
 place in Ibsen's Ufe I have already told, and 
 otherwise its interest is simply that which 
 attaches to any great man's Juvenilia. 
 
 In The Vikings at Helgeland we have a play 
 that can boldly stand comparison with any 
 of the great historical plays of Europe. I do 
 not mean that it is comparable to Shakespeare's 
 best ; but it is not easy to find anything parallel 
 to it (or to The Pretenders) outside Shakespeare. 
 It has far more vigour and passion than Schiller's 
 historic plays. It has far more touch with earth 
 and man than Goethe could show in Count 
 Egmont. It has affinities, perhaps, with Morris' 
 rendering of the sagas ; but I can find in it none 
 of that sentimentalism which has been brought 
 against it, as against (and with justice) Tennyson's 
 Idylls. The figure of Ornulf, the most splendid 
 type of a splendid tradition, as he sings the death- 
 song on the barrow of his slain sons, over the 
 grave of his murdered Benjamin, alone should 
 avail to redeem Ibsen from the charge of water- 
 ing down the stark blood and steel of the 
 sagas. 
 
 53 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 " Seven sons had Ornulf, 
 By the great gods granted. 
 Alone now and life-weary 
 Wanders he, sonless. 
 
 " Seven sons so splendid. 
 Bred among sword blades. 
 Made a great rampart 
 Round the stark sea-king. 
 
 " Ruin'd is the rampart. 
 Slain my sons sturdy ; 
 Gone is my gladness. 
 Desolate my dwelling. 
 
 " Nought the Norn denied me 
 Of her dr«ad treasures. 
 Showering all honours 
 O'er Ornulf's world-way. 
 
 " Though she stripped me sonless. 
 One great gift she gave me, 
 Songcraft's mighty secret, 
 Skill to sing my sorrows. 
 
 " On my lips she laid it. 
 The great gift of song-craft ; 
 Loud then let my lay sound 
 Ev'n where they are lying. 
 
 " Hail, my seven sons sturdy ! 
 Hail, as homeward ride ye ! 
 Songcraft's splendid god-gift 
 Stayeth woe and wailing." 
 
 54 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 
 
 Even more impressive than Ornulf is the 
 savage yet noble character of Hiordis, who 
 remains one of the most majestic representa- 
 tives of those stern, demanding, yet self-possessed 
 women of whom Ibsen was to give us so 
 many. Her figure, and that of the girl Dagny, 
 reappear again and again in his work ; and 
 no doubt represented to him not only two 
 women, but the two aspects of that feminine 
 character whose secrets he was never tired of 
 disclosing. 
 
 The Pretenders has a more strictly historical 
 background than any of Ibsen's other plays. 
 Its action is nearer our own times, and it is con- 
 cerned not with semi-heroic figures whose diplo- 
 macy is half savagery and half superstition, but 
 with the rather sordid, very intense political 
 atmosphere of the early thirteenth century. It 
 has in it four characters altogether worthy of 
 Ibsen : the two claimants to the throne, Hakon, 
 and Earl Skule, Bishop Nicholas and Jatgeir 
 Skeld. It is in the mouth of this last that 
 Ibsen puts one of the most suggestive of his 
 sayings. 
 
 King Skule. Tell me, Jatgeir, how came you to be 
 a bard ? Who taught you song-craft ? 
 
 Jatgeie. Song-craft cannot be taught, O King. 
 55 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 King S. Cannot be taught ? How came it then ? 
 
 Jatgeie. The gift of sorrow came to me, and I was 
 a bard. 
 
 King S. Then it is the gift of sorrow that a bard 
 needs ? 
 
 Jatgeir. It was sorrow / needed. Others may need 
 faith, or joy, or doubt 
 
 King S. Doubt as well ? 
 
 Jatgeir. Yes ; but then the doubter must be strong 
 and sound. 
 
 King S. And what do you mean by an unsound 
 doubter ? 
 
 Jatgeir. He who doubts his own doubt. 
 
 King S. {slowly). That, surely, were death. 
 
 Jatgeir. 'Tis worse ; 'tis death in life ! 
 
 It is the thought which recurs again, for a 
 moment, in Brand; which is worked out so 
 truly in JVie Master Builder. No doubt, as 
 Ibsen hinted in a letter of 1870, this play re- 
 presented much of his personal feelings at the 
 time. He was on the verge of leaving his 
 country ; and he was leaving it under a cloud 
 of misunderstanding and abuse. This abuse had 
 been showered upon him when he pubhshed 
 Love's Comedy, a year before the issue of The 
 Pretenders. 
 
 Love's Comedy is, in some ways, the crudest 
 of Ibsen's serious dramas. It is largely a satire 
 
 56 
 
LOVE'S COMEDY 
 
 on the betrothal customs of his native land ; on 
 the indulgence in that unreal and meaningless 
 sentiment that is bound togather around marriage 
 with the growth of prudery and false reticence ; an 
 attack on that divorce between love and marriage 
 which is certain to come where the sexes have 
 little natural intercourse, where marriages are 
 arranged by family counsel, parental interference 
 or the artful construction of a matrimonial 
 atmosphere. The hero Falk is bitter against all 
 these things. Ibsen had just, no doubt, had to 
 endure them ; and being no doubt rather a self- 
 conscious youth was quite needlessly impatient 
 of the coyly humorous gossiping of a betrothal. 
 Ibsen, however, married : Falk decides that the 
 only way to preserve love is for marriages not 
 to be an affair of affSsction, and for lovers to 
 refrain from marrying. In the play Falk leaves 
 Swanhild, but this is by no means a necessary 
 corollary of his doctrine. It amazes me, indeed, 
 to read English comments on this play. Dr. 
 Herford says : " If we ask what is the condition 
 which will secure courtship from ridicule, and 
 marriage from disillusion, Ibsen abruptly parts 
 company with his predecessors " [other critics of 
 conventional love-making and marr5dng] : " ' Of 
 course,' reply the rest in chorus, 'deep and sincere 
 love; together, add some, with prudent good 
 sense.' The prudent good sense Ibsen allows : 
 
 57 
 
HENRI K IBSEN 
 
 but he couples with it the startling paradox that 
 the first condition of a happy marriage is the 
 absence of love, and the first condition of an 
 enduring love the absence of marriage." Dr. 
 Herford's " startling paradox " has been a 
 commonplace of romantic and critical literature 
 since at least the days of Marie of France. It 
 is astonishing that any one at all conversant with 
 European literature should not observe that 
 Falk's (I will not call it Ibsen's) idea of love is 
 just a provincial and rather crude version of the 
 Dantesque theory of Love, as shown in Dante's 
 relations with Beatrice. But Dante is on too 
 high a level for comparison with Loves Comedy. 
 Let me take a writer nearer to the spirit of 
 levity, and full of worldly wisdom. " I see no 
 marriages faile sooner, or more troubled, than 
 such as are concluded for beauties sake, and 
 hudled up for amorous desires. There are re- 
 quired more solid foundations, a more constant 
 grounds, and a more warie marching to it : this 
 earnest youthly haste serveth to no purpose. 
 Those who thinke to honour marriage, by joyning 
 love with it (in mine opinion) doe as those, who 
 to doe vertue a favour, holde that nobilitie is no 
 other thing than vertue. ... A good marriage 
 (if any there be) refuses the company and con- 
 dition of love ; it endeavoureth to present those 
 of amity. ... It may be compared to a cage, 
 
 58 
 
LOVE'S COMEDY 
 
 the birds without dispaire to get in, and those 
 within dispaire to get out. . . . Few men have 
 wedded their sweethearts, their paramours, or 
 mistresses, but have come home by Weeping 
 Crosse, and ere long repented their bargaine." 
 So wrote Montaigne, and it might be Guldstad's 
 voice speaking. The truth is that this sharp 
 division between love and marriage must always 
 be felt in an age when the women are not men's 
 equals, and when marriage is a question of 
 expediency, of the family, of " the custom and 
 use of common life." And so long as the division 
 is felt you will have ardent souls rebelling 
 against it, and cynical souls, at any rate in the 
 evening of their lives, defending and excusing it. 
 I do not think we need seek further for Ibsen's 
 mind in Love's Comedy than to say that it is 
 his first protest on behalf of women, the first 
 diatribe against the conventions and laws that 
 make any human being more of an occasion than 
 a creature, more of a subject than a soul. 
 Much of the play is just a young man's half- 
 serious wrath against the dictates of the drawing- 
 room, even within the drawing-room's sphere : 
 what is more serious in it is a protest against 
 those same dictates when they presume to lay 
 hold on the sacred things of life and love. 
 Sooner than have his treasure on those terms 
 Falk is prepared to leave Swanhild and marriage, 
 
 59 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 and tramp along keeping his bride "in the 
 eternal life." It is not, of course, Ibsen's final 
 word on the problem, and we must take care 
 not to lay too much stress on the renunciation 
 scene. Ibsen never lays down general rules as 
 to method ; that was the way for Falk, just as 
 sorrow was what Jatgeir needed. All that the 
 poet insists on is that in any human relationship 
 the first thing to be studied is reality, and truth : 
 and that an over-attention to the accidents of 
 any relationship tends to make people forget 
 the truth and the reality. It is the old truth 
 that it is the altar which sanctifies the gift, and 
 Ibsen, at least, will make sure that it is the altar 
 at which he stands, however poor and empty- 
 handed may be his approach. 
 
 60 
 
Ill 
 
 BRAND: PEER GYNT 
 
 There are actually moments when the whole history of the world 
 appears to me one huge shipwreck, and the only important thing 
 seems to be to save one's self. 1871. 
 
 It is, I think, generally assumed in all criticism 
 of Brand that the final trial of his faith is when 
 the Doctor, fresh from Brand's mother's death- 
 bed, bids him leave his cell and his icy home if 
 he wishes to save his child's life. After a scene 
 of doubt, of agony, of discussion with Agnes, 
 Brand decides to stay, and dooms his child. 
 Now I agree that this scene with the Doctor is 
 the keynote of the poem, but I deny that Brand's 
 response is the true one ; I do not mean ab- 
 solutely true, but that it is in accordance with 
 his character and his mission. Readers of the 
 play wiU remember that Brand comes back to 
 his village and is content there, in spite of am- 
 bition, to begin his work of burying the old god 
 of Einar and all careless Christians. His war- 
 cry is "All or Nothing," and he refuses to go 
 to his dying mother so long as she clings to her 
 
 61 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 gold ; then the Doctor accuses him of being 
 harder with others than with himself, when 
 Brand in horror at the fate that threatens his 
 child, prepares to leave his post. Brand drugs 
 himself by repeating " All or Nothing," drugs 
 his wife, and kills, in effect, his child. 
 
 Now this act of his is treated, for instance by 
 Mr. Garrett, as fine, and having " the pity and 
 terror of life." 1 think Mr. Garrett and others 
 in this have confused the message of the poem 
 with the inevitable course of the tragedy. This 
 response of Brand's, the refusal to leave even to 
 save his child's life, is not the crown on a strong 
 and vigorous creed ; it is a lapse, a confession 
 of weakness, an ignoble act of failure. What 
 right has Brand to decide that God is asking for 
 his child's death rather than demanding his child 
 should live ? if to save his child's life be to for- 
 sake his creed, then Brand forsook it when he 
 married Agnes. Why should he decide that 
 God, even his stern God, asks him to renounce 
 Alf, if he allowed him to cherish Agnes ? Brand 
 is not the history of a soul that climbs from 
 one height to another of renunciation and self- 
 denial, and is then splendidly overwhelmed by the 
 forces of nature, while a mysterious voice " ends 
 upon a note of vague hope." It is the far more 
 tragic history of a soul who begins his noble life 
 with a determination for self-denial, who achieves 
 
 62 
 
BRAND 
 
 much, and who alas I when the real test comes, 
 breaks on the rock that so many high souls are 
 dashed against, the rock of pride. 
 
 This, to my mind, Ibsen makes plain enough. 
 After the Doctor's kindly taunt a man comes 
 from the village to see Brand. 
 
 The Man. Your seed was springing, left and right, 
 Until the Sheriff's gossip ran 
 And struck the green blades with a blight. 
 He's spread the rumour, everywhere. 
 That soon the parsonage '11 be bare ; 
 He says, you'll turn your back and go 
 Once your rich mother's laid below, 
 
 Beand. And if it were so ? 
 
 The Man. Priest, I know you. 
 
 And whence these slander weeds have grown ; 
 You've stood against him, you alone ; 
 He's grappled and he could not throw you ; 
 And there's a grudge he'll always owe you. 
 
 Brand (hesitatingly). There might be truth in what he 
 spread. 
 
 The Man. Then you have lied before us all. 
 
 Brand. I, lied ? 
 
 The Man. How often have you said 
 That God has roused you to His call, — 
 That now with us you have your home. 
 That it is here you'll overcome ; 
 
 63 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 That man must hold his mission's field, 
 Strike blow on blow and never yield ? 
 Yours is the call ! for strong and bright 
 Your fire's in many a breast alight ! 
 
 Brand. Man, here the crowd is deaf and blind. 
 Quenched down and duU'd is every mind. 
 
 The Man. Nay, you know better ; many a one 
 Has caught a glimpse of heaven and sun. 
 
 Brand. In tenfold more is gloomy night. 
 
 The Man. You are the lamp that gives the light. 
 But let all this be as it may, 
 Here is no need to count, I say ; 
 For here stand I, one only man, 
 And say, desert me if you can ! 
 I too have got a soul : I look 
 To you to help me with the Book ; 
 'Tis you that dragged me from the deep ; — 
 Now see if you dare let me slip ! 
 You cannot ! Firm I hold as oak ; 
 My soul were lost if this hold broke ! 
 Farewell ! I know I shall not see 
 My priest forsake his God and me. 
 
 To this appeal, and to the wild hints of the 
 mad girl Gerd, Brand yields. His pride, for 
 that is surely his rock of offence, is too great 
 for his love and trust. He makes the wrong 
 decision, and then, with a heart-broken cry, calls 
 out " Jesu ! Jesu ! give me light." Surely never 
 
 64 
 
BRAND 
 
 was Ibsen's enormous power of irony more poign- 
 antly used than when he put this prayer into 
 Brand's mouth after he had made up his mind. 
 
 This incident is, as I have said, the keynote of 
 the tragedy. It is Brand's failure to give up 
 "AH" that, from this point, turns his life to 
 failure, almost to madness and then to the defeat 
 which remained for him the only victory. He 
 had the chance of applying his own stern mes- 
 sage to himself; he had the chance of giving 
 up his call, and instead he gave up first his 
 child, then his wife and, in a final desperate effort, 
 his own life. He sacrificed what is given to a 
 man only to cherish : no man can exercise the 
 right of renunciation for another, not for wife 
 or child. And when the avalanche breaks over 
 his head, and in answer to his appeal — 
 
 " Answer me, O God above ! 
 In death's jaws : can human will, 
 Summ'd, avail no fraction still 
 Of Salvation ? " — 
 
 a voice cries through the thunder's roar " God is 
 Love," we have a play ending not in a renewal 
 of that false sentiment which Brand has denied 
 and denounced, but on a reassertion of the truth 
 that Ibsen is never tired of repeating, that 
 nothing can count against Love. Brand fails 
 because he was false to Love; his sin was es- 
 sentially the same as John Gabriel Borkman's, 
 E 65 
 
HENRI K IBSEN 
 
 he sacrificed to his ambition the woman who 
 loved him. 
 
 I am aware that there are sentences of Ibsen's 
 own which seem to contradict this theory of the 
 central motive of Brand. He speaks of him as 
 of a man who " stood firm," and says that the 
 demand " all or nothing " is made in all domains 
 of life ; but still I would urge here the fact that 
 the poet is not the best interpreter of his play. 
 In writing so resonant, so complete and perfect 
 a poem as Brand it is only natural that the 
 author should be carried away by the splendour 
 of his chief character, for Brand is always 
 splendid. But in the joy of creation, and even 
 in subsequent thought, the poet may not see the 
 full significance of his character. I rather think 
 that at this period there were uncertainties in 
 Ibsen's mind ; but this is at any rate worthy of 
 notice that if we keep to the ordinary interpreta- 
 tion of the play which renders Brand a mistaken 
 but glorious hero who goes from one height of 
 self-denial to another, we have to explain away 
 the end of the poem as a kind of romantic lapse. 
 This I refuse to do. 1 cannot believe that Ibsen, 
 who was never romantic in mind, and whose 
 romanticism of method was more the result of 
 environment and literary tradition than of any 
 settled theory, would have spoiled the whole 
 significance of his play for the sake of a weak 
 
 66 
 
BRAND 
 
 tag, and a meaningless concession to popular 
 feeling. Brand's tragedy, for me, ceases to be 
 tragic if we view the play in the accepted sense 
 as the orderly development of a strong character 
 finally beaten by forces too great for him ; and 
 it is incredible to me that Ibsen, whose whole 
 creed is based on the two great corner-stones of 
 Will and Love, should ever have entertained 
 seriously such a conception as a man entirely 
 crushed by fate. No, Brand's condemnation is 
 out of his own mouth ; he ranges, in his very 
 different sphere, with Torvald and Rubek ; he 
 had the great opportunity, he could have achieved 
 the miracle of miracles, and he failed. The 
 moment he points to the house-door instead of 
 to the garden-gate, at that moment he pro- 
 nounces his own doom in his abandonment of his 
 great principles. For one moment he allowed the 
 appearance of things rather than the things them- 
 selves to guide him, and that moment was fatal. 
 Of the general power and beauty of Brand 
 there is to-day hardly need to speak. It has 
 long ago taken its place beside Faust as one of 
 the few great dramatic poems of Europe. What 
 is perhaps most noticeable in it is the care with 
 which Ibsen avoids caricature (save perhaps in 
 Dean) in his representation of the people and 
 forces opposed to Brand. He never allows us 
 to think that all the right is on Brand's side even 
 
 67 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 in the earlier acts when Brand is so vastly 
 superior to his opponents. In this way the play 
 is as considerable an achievement as the Antigone; 
 it shows a clear battle between two principles, 
 one of which, it is true, is greater than the other ; 
 but in each of them are elements of nobility and 
 truth. The Doctor, who does not deny physical 
 succour to Brand's mother ; the Sheriff, who is 
 at any rate concerned for the physical well-being 
 of his neighbours ; Gerd, who illustrates so 
 pathetically and forcibly what a fine nature 
 warped must make out of Brand's passionate 
 attack upon institutions ; even Einar, who shows 
 how mean a cry the clarion " All or Nothing " 
 may become in the lips of a narrow nature — 
 they all help, not only to throw Brand's principle 
 into greater contrast, but also to show the higher 
 truth which would reconcile Brand and the 
 Sheriff, or, shall we say. Brand and Agnes. For 
 it is the character of Agnes which, for many of 
 us, makes Brand a more enchanting poem than 
 Faust. This girl whose joy, on her "conversion," 
 turns not to bitterness, but to strength ; who 
 understands Brand better than he understands 
 himself; whose character remains sweet even 
 after Brand's fall, is one of the most splendid 
 and sincere women in all Ibsen's works. Nothing 
 is more subtle or surer than the great scene in 
 the fourth act when Agnes, after the terrible 
 
 68 
 
BRAND 
 
 episode of the Vagrant Woman, repeats with so 
 intense a terror the cruel lesson that she has 
 learnt from her husband. With the loss of her 
 child began the dying of Agnes : Brand when he 
 deliberately sacrificed the love which he should 
 have cherished, lost the love that cherished 
 him ; love the woman follows love the child out 
 into the darkness, and Brand is left alone to 
 wrestle with the growing and insane terror of 
 his final conflict. 
 
 In the great last act, after the enthusiasm of 
 the following crowd has flagged and failed, the 
 Dean, the Sheriff", and the people he befriended 
 taunt him with his failures, with the loss of his 
 child and wife. It is the final punishment of all 
 that his acts should be questioned, not his mo- 
 tives. But it was in motive that he had failed ; 
 he had glorified Will at the expense of Love, 
 and the avalanche testifies not to the breaking 
 of WiU by blind fate, but to the swallowing 
 up of Will in divine Love. 
 
 It has been suggested to me that the scene 
 between Brand and the wraith of Agnes in 
 Act V makes my interpretation of the crisis in 
 Act III an impossible one. " Here," it is argued, 
 "you have Agnes urging Brand to return, to 
 accept life with her and Alf ; and his refusal is 
 treated as something to be applauded." This is 
 true ; but this criticism ignores the point of my 
 
 69 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 contention. I insist not that Brand ought to 
 have left with Agnes and Alf ; but that he ought 
 to have seen that such departure was the real 
 corollary of his own catchword. The wraith of 
 Agnes asks him to give up his watchword " All 
 or Nothing." This, of course, was never Brand's 
 duty: where he fails is in applying his watch- 
 word. He really ends not by giving God all, 
 but by giving God nothing, or as near to nothing 
 as any man can get. He sins in believing the 
 problem of Caesar versus God to be one of 
 simple subtraction ; that everything taken from 
 Caesar naturally goes to God. Of course the 
 real problem of any idealist is to find out not 
 what his duty is, but how he can do it. Brand, 
 whenever he comes to a knot, cuts it, whenever 
 he meets the Sphinx, kills her ; just as Peer Gynt 
 walks round the Sphinx and throws away the 
 knotted string, while Solveig unties the knot 
 and, by reading the riddle, takes the Sphinx 
 captive. 
 
 If, too, Brand's character is taken as develop- 
 ing serenely along right lines, what is the 
 significance of that other passage in the last 
 scene when he bursts into tears and cries : 
 
 " Frost endures throughout the Law ; 
 Then comes sunlight, then the thaw ! 
 Till to-day I strove to be 
 Tablets for God to write on me ; 
 
 70 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 From to-day my life shall flow 
 
 Free and rich, with warmth a-glow. 
 
 Now the ice crust breaks away 
 
 I can weep . . . and kneel . . . and pray ! " 
 
 This passage appears to me, like the conclusion 
 of the poem, to be mere nonsense unless we 
 assume that somewhere in his life Brand has gone 
 crooked and perverse ; and both from its character 
 and structure I argue that the " somewhere " is 
 the episode when he decides his child's fate. 
 
 Peer Gynt has three main motives. It is 
 an attack on the spirit which is content with 
 appearance rather than realities ; it is a defence 
 of the doctrine — just as is Brand and half 
 a dozen other plays — that Love can save to the 
 uttermost ; and without discussing it embodies 
 Ibsen's interest in heredity. 
 
 In its first aspect Peer Gynt is an obvious 
 foil to Brand. Peer wants not All, but Every- 
 thing ; and he gets most things in life, and in 
 getting them almost misses the whole. He is 
 not the true dreamer ; he is a man of fancy, not 
 of imagination. He dreams the dreams of 
 others, and lives on the old fairy-stories of his 
 country. Here he is but the son of his mother, 
 who tells Solveig — 
 
 "Yes — you must know that my man used to drink. 
 Around the parish for gossip would slink. 
 Wasted and threw to the winds all our stuff. 
 And meanwhile sat Peerkin and I, all day ; 
 
 71 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 The best thing was to keep memory away — 
 
 To bear up under all I've found hard enough. 
 
 It's a horrible thing to look fate in the eyes ; 
 
 And of course one would gladly try and shake sorrow off. 
 
 And do all one can to keep thoughts of to-morrow off. 
 
 Some take to brandy, and some take to lies, 
 
 And we — well, we took to fairy-tales 
 
 Of princes and trolls and grim beasts with scales. 
 
 And bride-rape as well. But who could have said 
 
 That those tales of the fiends would stick in his head ? " 
 
 Peer, the dreamer of others' dreams : Peer, a 
 sort of pinchbeck Shelley, once in his life comes 
 into contact with reality. He meets Solveig,^ 
 loves her, quarrels with her, and then flies from 
 reality to its shadow in the arms of Ingrid, to its 
 degradation in the embraces of the Saeter-girls, 
 and to its caricature in the liaison with the Troll- 
 maiden. Then Solveig meets him again, and 
 Peer, full of ugly pride, boasts that "The 
 Dovre-King's daughter wants me for her own " ; 
 and Solveig flees. 
 
 This brings to the surface all that is best 
 in Peer. Outlawed, he builds in the forest a hut, 
 and to him there Solveig comes ; Peer here 
 becomes greater than Brand ever is. He does 
 not propound to his love a decree to which 
 she must assent ; he is humble, thankful and 
 happy — for some five._ininute&. in full touch 
 with reality. Then comes his trial. The Troll- 
 maiden, hideously transformed, comes to him 
 
 72 
 
 _> 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 in the forest, bringing with her the misshapen 
 brat, born of Peer's desires. She demands her 
 place by Solveig's side. Peer cannot make up 
 his mind to tell Solveig the truth, yet he will 
 not stoop to deceive her. He flees and leaves 
 Solveig to live on the memory of the true Peer, 
 while he himself trails over Europe, Egypt and 
 America, ever pursuing the phantom of living, 
 but having left life itself behind. Everyone 
 knows now that wonderful fifth act in which 
 Peer re-enacts so many of his past experiences 
 and memories ; he has lost, almost, his capacity 
 for false dreaming, and tinsel no longer seems 
 like gold. Yet he clings still to his old sham 
 standards, and when everything else is gone, 
 he clings to the reality of his sins. 
 
 Then comes the Button-Moulder, and denies 
 that his sins have been genuine. He is given 
 a chance, and again another to prove his point 
 that he has, at last, in his sins been himself; but 
 all his witnesses, even the Devil himself, fail 
 him. The old man, disillusioned, cries out — 
 
 " Then a soul can, so horribly poor, slip away 
 Back to nothingness, into the mists and the grey . . , 
 O beautiful earth, be not angry, I pray, 
 That for nothing I've trampled thy grass sweet-smelling. 
 O beautiful sun, thou hast squander' d away 
 Thy glory of light on a desolate dwelling ; 
 To warm and attune it was none to begin there — 
 The owner, they tell me, was never within there. 
 73 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Beautiful sun and beautiful earth. 
 
 You were foolish to cherish my mother at birth. 
 
 The spirit is niggard and nature is lavish. 
 
 And one's life for one's birth is a high price to ravish. . . . 
 
 I will up to the hills, to the loftiest one ; 
 
 I will look once more on the rising sun. 
 
 Gaze over the promised land, gaze away 
 
 Till I'm tired ; then try and get snow-drifts to cover me. 
 
 And ' Here no one lies buried ' have written over me — 
 
 And afterwards — then — ! Let things go as they may." 
 
 But the play does not end on this note of 
 despair. Peer wanders back to the forest where 
 years before he welcomed Solveig; and there 
 she still sits and waits. Here, at last, is a real 
 sin : here at least in his betrayal and desertion 
 he was himself. He cries out to Solveig : 
 
 Peer Gynt. Have you doom for the sinner. Then speak 
 the word. 
 
 Solveig. It is he ! It is he ! O ! praised be the Lord. 
 
 Peer Gynt. All my sins and trespasses ! Cry and call ! 
 
 Solveig. My own lad, in nought hast thou sinn'd at all ! 
 
 The Button-Moulder. The sin-list, Peer Gynt .'' 
 
 Peer Gynt. Cry out all my wrong ! 
 
 Solveig. Thou hast made all my life as a beautiful song ! 
 Blessed be thou, whom at last I am greeting ! 
 Blessed, thrice-blessed our Whitsun-morn meeting ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. Then I am lost. 
 
 74 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 SoLVEiG. One yet reigns in the skies. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Lost ! If you have not for riddles replies. 
 
 SoLVEiG. Ask me them. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Ask them ! — Ah ! once we get started — ! 
 Can you tell me where Peer Gynt has been since we 
 parted ? 
 
 SoLVEiG. Been ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. As when first from God's thought he went 
 winging ; 
 Been with his destiny's mark on his brow ! 
 Can'st thou tell me that ? If not, I must bow 
 And go down where the mists are clinging 
 
 SoLVEiG. Ah, that riddle is easy. 
 
 Peer Gynt. If you know it, speak now ! 
 
 Where was I, myself, I, the true man, the whole ? 
 Where was I with the seal of God set on my soul .'' 
 
 SoLVEiG. In my faith, in my hope, in my love wast 
 thou. 
 
 Peer Gynt. What say you ! Ah ! peace ! With words 
 you are playing. 
 You are mother yourself to the lad who is there. 
 
 SoLVEiG. Yes, I am ; but who is his father. Peer .'' 
 Surely he who forgives at the mother's praying. 
 
 Peer Gynt. My mother ! My wife ! Woman pure 
 from all sin ! — 
 Oh ! hide me, hide me therein ! 
 75 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Ever since Ibsen has been studied at all this 
 conclusion to Peer Gynt has been severely 
 criticized ; " crowningly unreal self-realization " 
 is the flippant comment of Mr. Shaw^. That is 
 a possible view ; but if it is the true one, vfe are 
 compelled to own that not only is Peer deceived, 
 but the poet himself. For if there is one clearer 
 theme than this — the saving power of love — in 
 Ibsen's whole dramatic work, I know not where 
 to look for it. The truth is the critics of this 
 solution are themselves obsessed with the old 
 romanticism which they ascribe to Ibsen. Mr. 
 Shaw's chief fault has always been senti- 
 mentalism, sweet in such a play as Candida, 
 rancid in The Philanderer, strong in Mrs. 
 Warren's Profession and sloppy in Blanco 
 Posnet: he naturally fears and finds sentiment 
 in the most unlikely quarters, and his fear of it 
 makes him find it here. What then is the 
 difference between this solution of Ibsen's and 
 the ordinary romantic one ? It should, I think, 
 be sufficiently obvious. The romantic gives us, 
 time and again, a character who is represented 
 as fine and defiant and nobly wicked: he is 
 generally saved, still believing himself to be a 
 fine fellow, by senile attachment to some old 
 sentiment which he has always half despised and 
 forgotten. Now Ibsen gives us a picture clean 
 contrary to this. He shows us a man who, in 
 
 76 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 a pitiless way, is stripped of every rag of self- 
 conceit ; who has always cherished, even in his 
 most futile moments, some recollection of the 
 one fine reality in his Ufe, who, at last, turns to 
 that for condemnation and then finds not de- 
 struction but life. And as if to warn us that 
 the self-realization is not empty or unreal Ibsen 
 makes the Button-Moulder warn Peer that they 
 will meet again. It will not be enough for Peer 
 to shp into a lazy acceptance of offered salva- 
 tion ; he will have, at the final crossways, to show 
 what use he has made of it.' Again, too, such a 
 criticism as Georg Brandes' complaint against the 
 conclusion as " glaringly conventional " : " Sol- 
 veig, by her faithful love, saves the really wholly 
 unworthy soul of her beloved," seems to me 
 to show a complete misapprehension of Ibsen's 
 meaning. In the romantic sense (Brandes com- 
 pares the conclusion of Peer Gynt with that 
 of Faust and Adam Homo) no one can save 
 another's soul, salvation is never of a passive 
 object : and Ibsen, if even as a boy he may have 
 
 ' In a play so full of correspondences as Peer Gynt it is worth 
 noticing that Peer meets the Button-Moulder at three crossways, 
 which may he taken to correspond to his three missed opportunitieSj 
 viz. in Act I, when he tries to hully Solveig into dancing with him ; 
 in Act II, when he tries to impress her by bragging of the Dovre 
 Princess; in Act III, when he shirks telling Solveig the truth. 
 The fourth crossway, after the final reconciliation with Solveig, is 
 outside the drama. 
 
 77 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 dreamt of such an ideal, can never have accepted 
 it. It is the central error of that Calvinism from 
 which he seems to have revolted as soon as he 
 understood it. The whole point of Peer Gynt 
 is that Peer has got a real life : reality is a 
 matter of intensity, and he felt truly and deeply 
 and sincerely his love for Solveig. To object 
 that externally he was false to that ideal, that he 
 befouled and besmirched it, is right, but you can- 
 not go on to conclude from that that he lost his 
 ideal. Solveig's happiness in the true Peer is far 
 more of a fact than all Peer's wanderings and 
 weaknesses and lies, for her happiness is based 
 on something real in his character ; his offences 
 are only those of a weak, shiftless creature, never 
 of a really bad man. To allow Peer's indignities 
 and dreams to weigh against this one true 
 characteristic is to commit the offence that 
 modern critics have condemned in Ibsen : it is 
 to sacrifice the real to the unreal. Those who 
 say Solveig's love for Peer saves him have mis- 
 understood the whole drama ; it is Peer's love 
 for Solveig, still flickering amid disaster, ruin 
 and disgrace, that gives him the strength and 
 the right to look forward with confidence to the 
 ultimate crossway. 
 
 It is necessary here to notice briefly the theo- 
 logical atmosphere of the two poetic plays. 
 There is no need, I think, to plunge into com- 
 
 78 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 parisons between Ibsen and Soren Kierkegard ; 
 Ibsen himself has left it on record that Kierke- 
 gard was not the model of Brand, and in a 
 letter to his sister he acknowledges that a 
 religious revival at Skien, of which one Pastor 
 Lammers was the leader, had left traces on his 
 literary productions. Brand, too, he told Georg 
 Brandes, might have been a sculptor ; his clerical 
 character is accidental: yet with all this the 
 theological tinge of Brand, Peer Gynt and 
 Emperor and Galilean is far from accidental. 
 Brand's religious language may be taken as due 
 to his profession, but Peer Gynt is scarcely less 
 ready in his references to God and to religion. 
 Both plays represent Ibsen's gradual abandon- 
 ment — of which there is a hint in another 
 letter to his sister — of the Calvinist creed of his 
 country. Now quite the most noticeable feature 
 of popular Calvinism is its tendency to replace 
 the doctrine of the Atonement by the doctrine 
 of substitution. Brand is on his crusade to bury 
 the old God, whose terrors have become trivial ; 
 but he is still not free from the idea that Christ 
 was the price of our sins that a cunning devil 
 bargained out of an angry God. Now, in Peer 
 Gynt, probably quite unconsciously Ibsen has 
 arrived at the Catholic doctrine of the Atone- 
 ment, that the merits of Christ are indeed our 
 salvation but have to be applied by the in- 
 
 79 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 dividual. I said "unconsciously," but indeed 
 the resemblance to a doctrinal statement at 
 the end of the play, " He who forgives at the 
 mother's praying," is so strong that I wonder 
 whether his arrival at the truth was unconscious. 
 Solveig saves Peer only by helping him to save 
 himself: when Ibsen brought his play to that 
 conclusion he shook off for ever the old for- 
 mulae of Calvinism. 
 
 While the beauty of Brand can be discovered 
 by English readers in two admirable versions. 
 Peer Gynt still waits for a worthy English dress. 
 Mr. Archer would be the last to claim that his 
 sincere and literal version is more than the skele- 
 ton of a great poem. The loss of rhyme 
 detracts enormously — especially in the long 
 fourth act — from the humour, the lightness, 
 the gaiety and splendour of the play. I am 
 afraid with regard to Peer Gynt I have no 
 patience with the critics who wish this or that 
 scene left out. The fourth act, which was 
 treated so hardly on the first publication, con- 
 tains scenes so astounding as the explosion of 
 the yacht ; so beautiful as Peer's greeting to the 
 morning and so humorous as the scene with the 
 monkeys. I think, too, that the faults of the first 
 scene have been exaggerated ; the conversation 
 between Peer Gynt and his four companions 
 serves to put us in a right frame of mind to 
 
 80 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 appreciate the great gap of years between Act IV 
 and Act III. And is there not something 
 worthy of Browning in Peer's account of his 
 trading adventures ? 
 
 Me. Cotton. What did you trade in ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. Most I scored 
 
 By negro slaves for Carolina 
 And idol-images for China. 
 
 M. Bathon. Fi done ! 
 
 TauMEPETEESTEALE. The devil ! Uncle Gynt ! 
 
 Peee Gynt. The trade was almost absolutely 
 Impossible is what you think ? 
 I felt the same myself acutely. 
 I thought it ev'n abominable. 
 But pray believe me, once you're in it, 
 To break away you'll scarce be able. 
 'Tis very hard to interrupt 
 So vast a business, so expensive. 
 Employing thousands in extensive 
 Enterprise, to end all abrupt ! 
 It's that " abrupt " I can't abide ; 
 But then upon the other side 
 I've always found myself agree 
 With those who care for consequences. 
 And that to overstep the fences 
 Has never seem'd . . . quite nice to me. 
 Besides that, youth and I were sundering ; 
 F 81 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Back to the forties no endeavour 
 Would take me ; and my hair was grey ; 
 And though my health could not be better 
 A thought clung to me, like a fetter : 
 Who knows how soon may dawn the day 
 When the great verdict shall be thundering 
 That parts the sheep and goats for ever ? 
 
 It might be the very spirit of Manchester 
 speaking, the spirit of the people who opposed 
 Shaftesbury, and still plead for the freedom of 
 commerce from moral conditions I 
 
 It is not, however, for its satire that the world 
 will value Peer Gynt. The bald skeleton I gave 
 was only intended to show the lines of the argu- 
 ment of the play ; it took no account of the 
 wonderful character of Peer's mother, Ase, who 
 figures in what is the most pathetic death-scene 
 in modern literature, not to be matched outside 
 Shakespeare. The reality, the truth under the 
 grim humour, of Ase's death-scene cannot escape 
 in any version, though it is impossible to achieve 
 the inimitable lilt of the original. 
 
 Peee. You sang many a song, you remember ? 
 As you sat down here by my bed, 
 To shorten the nights of November, 
 And I had the fur over me spread. 
 
 82 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 AsE. Ah ! Remember ! We play'd at sledges 
 When your father was far away ; there 
 For our ijord with the sharp ice-edges 
 The floor ; and our apron the fur. 
 
 Peer. Yes, but the best of course is, — 
 Do you remember that, too ? 
 Mother, the fleet-footed horses — ? 
 
 AsE. Remember ! Be sure I do ! 
 
 We had Kari's cat as a loan ; and 
 It sat on the chair — oh ! the fun — 
 
 Peer. To the Castle West of the Moon and 
 The Castle East of the Sun ; 
 To Soria-Moria castle 
 
 High and low, the road ran wide : 
 We found a stick with a tassel ; 
 " 'Twill serve for a whip," we cried. 
 
 fever before perhaps have all the little things 
 of life been brought to such a poignancy as they 
 are in Peer Gynt. Ibsen disdains to try and 
 get his effect by heightening or idealizing. Ase 
 is just a peasant woman, chattering, foolish, 
 scatter-brained ; Solveig is a simple, trustful 
 country girl ; Peer himself never quite loses the 
 touch of vulgarity that so invariably attaches 
 itself to the man who tries to be a "blade." 
 Yet out of these materials Ibsen has written one 
 of the greatest tragedies in literature. We are 
 entranced as we read it ; we cease to care, after 
 the first few pages, whether it conforms to any 
 
 83 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 known rule or not ; we are ready to echo at the 
 end, with its author, " My book is poetry ; and, 
 if it is not, then it will be. The conception of 
 poetry shall be made to conform to the book." 
 Fortunately we in England shook off the aca- 
 demic critic earlier than did Scandinavia ; the 
 Danish critic Petersen will only go down to 
 posterity as the man who said Peer Gynt was 
 not poetry. 
 
 It is a greater poem than Brand, more 
 original, richer and in the application of rhythm 
 to meaning amazingly powerful and original. 
 It has affinities with other European work, but 
 it comes nearer to Aristophanes than to any 
 modern author. Its astonishing buoyancy of 
 treatment, its unflagging temper, the mastery 
 of the theme, the ease with which Ibsen turns 
 from grave to gay are all reminiscent of the 
 author of The Birds and The Frogs. But the 
 figure of Ase was beyond the powers of Aristo- 
 phanes, and by the creation of her and Agnes 
 Ibsen took incontestable place among the few 
 great men of letters of his age. 
 
 The tendency to regard Brand and Peer Gynt 
 as companion poems is a true one ; but I cannot 
 say as do some, that Peer is the embodiment of 
 the spirit of half-heartedness, that he stands for 
 all against which Brand protested. Nor do I 
 agree with the conclusion that puts Peer down 
 
 84 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 as a worse fellow than Brand : after all Peer 
 stands his one test successfully. He takes long 
 about it, and he has many shps by the way ; 
 but he does get home. Brand is false to his 
 best self, false it is true with a splendour and 
 sternness that half-hypnotize the reader into 
 agreement with him : Peer is, once and again, 
 forgetful and negligent of his true self, but he 
 is never false to it at bottom, else would Solveig 
 have died as Agnes died. So Peer Gynt while 
 complementary to Brand is really also a criticism 
 of it : in it Ibsen shows that even a man with 
 foolish and selfish habits can, by one great trait 
 in his character, keep his soul more effectually 
 than does another who is infinitely his superior 
 in almost everything except this one capacity 
 for being self-less, at any rate for a moment, for 
 one other human being. Brand, until he is 
 broken to his knees in the final scene, has only 
 one " soul-side," he looks at God, at his mother, 
 at his people, at his wife from the platform or 
 the pulpit. He acts to himself and to every 
 one else. Peer Gynt acts more consummately, 
 more mischievously, more wickedly, if you will, 
 to his God, to his mother, to his friends, but 
 not to his beloved. So Peer, in that capacity 
 for being himself in his love for Solveig, has 
 kept a soul which avails him against the demands 
 of the Button-Moulder. 
 
 85 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 A great deal of the most characteristic work 
 in Peer Gynt is due to the folk-tale origin of 
 the play. Chief among the borrowed symbolic 
 "properties" is the Boyg. It is worth while 
 noticing that the Boyg cannot be, as Brandes 
 suggests, the Spirit of Compromise or "the 
 embodiment of all that turns aside and goes 
 round about." The play itself suggests, pretty 
 plainly, that the Boyg and the Sphinx are the 
 same thing ; and I am sure that the Boyg, so 
 far from being "what turns aside," is precisely 
 what does not turn aside. It is the riddle of 
 life. It is that which tempts a man to stray 
 from his course, to hold his hand, to evade, 
 to lie and to pretend. 
 
 It represents that in life which grows and grows 
 while it is yielded to, which feeds on fancy and 
 increases with its opponent's tactical mistakes. 
 It is that in life which yields swiftly at the 
 touch of truth, at the slightest hint of reality. 
 It represents all those puzzling, teasing problems 
 of thought and conduct which a man can always 
 solve — which Peer does in the end solve — by 
 doing what is plainly the right thing at the 
 moment. There is no need to press too literally 
 all the other incidents that Ibsen borrowed from 
 the folk-tale ; and we must always remember 
 the part that caprice plays in a poem like 
 Peer Gynt, and many figures and incidents, 
 
 86 
 
PEER GYNT 
 
 like that of the Strange Passenger (as Ibsen 
 acknowledged) are put in just because the young 
 poet, drunk with the sun of Italy, thought he 
 would. It is a great tribute to the essential 
 unity of the play that, though written in that 
 mood, it contains no inconsonant figure, no in- 
 congruous scene. There is nothing, however 
 fantastic, in the play which does not help to 
 throw light on the hero's character ; there is no 
 person, however seemingly intrusive, whose part 
 has not a real connection with the problem of 
 the drama. 
 
 87 
 
IV 
 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN 
 
 In the character of Julian, however, as in most of what I have 
 written in my riper years, there is much more of my own inner life 
 than I care to acknowledge to the public. 1870. 
 
 Ibsen's world -drama remained, to the end, 
 his favourite play. Nor is it difficult to see 
 why. It occupied his thoughts for some nine 
 years, those nine years the years between 
 thirty-six and forty-five, when a man's maturest 
 intellectual powers are showing themselves. 
 He laboured on it, on and off, from 1864 
 to 1873, and he gave the period and char- 
 acter a remarkable amount of attention and 
 study. Ibsen was no great reader, and he took 
 no trouble, we are told, to " keep abreast of the 
 times " by reading the literature of his contempo- 
 raries ; yet this man, averse from regular study, 
 impatient of book-learning, wandered through 
 the writings of Gregory, of Ammianus, of Julian 
 himself, through Danish pamphlets on Julian, 
 and Neander's history. It is little wonder that 
 he retained a great affection for the child of so 
 much labour. While, however, we cannot dis- 
 pute that Ibsen regarded Emperor and Galilean 
 as his favourite book, no one will agree with him 
 
 88 
 
EMPEROR AND GALILEAN 
 
 and call it his greatest. It is not that as a play, 
 and it is not that as a spiritual document ; but 
 it has, apart from its own striking merits, a great 
 importance in throwing light on Ibsen's spiritual 
 development. 
 
 The play, or rather the plays, suffer very 
 greatly from the fact that in the second Ibsen 
 suddenly makes the work bear the burden of his 
 own " spiritual experience " or " inner life." In 
 the fii'st part we have a free reconstruction of 
 Julian's youth. There is nothing impossible in 
 the drama, nothing that is incongruous with 
 what we know of Julian, or of the other historical 
 personages that are put on the stage. The 
 empty Christianity against which Julian rebels, 
 the true Christianity of which his own spirit is 
 part, the atmosphere of court intrigue and 
 factious religious and political strife are all 
 rendered with truth and skill. In the second 
 play Ibsen, as Mr. Archer says, " cogs the dice 
 against Julian " ; he ascribes to him actions in 
 which Julian had no share ; he invents unworthy 
 motives for murders that Julian, probably sin- 
 cerely, deplored ; he is not content with the 
 actual miracles that did occur, but will have 
 others about which his authorities are silent ; he 
 makes out Julian's famous Edict about Educa- 
 tion to be worse than it was ; he pits against 
 Julian the memory of the past, the prejudices of 
 
 89 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 the present, and the menace of the future, and 
 finally sends him out of the drama and the 
 world, disgraced, dishonoured, an object of pity, 
 indeed, but almost of ridicule as well. 
 
 Can we explain why Ibsen's sympathies sud- 
 denly veer round ? In the first part, while he is 
 fair to the nobler elements in Christianity, he is 
 evidently on Julian's side ; in the second part he 
 is evidently tired of his hero, disgusted with his 
 theories, and ready to mock at his religion. I 
 do not think there is need to seek out any 
 far-fetched explanation. I believe Ibsen began 
 the play with the idea that Julian was an heroic 
 character ; he discovered that he was only an 
 heroic figure : Julian's dignity and heroism are 
 simply that which we give to any man fighting 
 against odds. |Ie was a very tiresome, pedantic, 
 scholastic person, more like our own James the 
 First than anyone else. When Ibsen found 
 this out he was suddenly seized with the con- 
 viction that Julian was wrong. Had his cause 
 been right it would have made a far better fight 
 than it did ; it would have won a few adherents 
 and no sycophants, a few disciples and no para- 
 sites ; it would have blazed a real, and not a sort 
 of Bengal, fire. Yet it was evident that Julian's 
 protest was against ignoble things : where then 
 did he fail ? He failed in not recognizing the 
 nobility that lay behind so much that seemed 
 
 90 
 
EMPEROR AND GALILEAN 
 
 ignoble. He failed in not seeing that all that 
 was best in paganism had gone, or was going, 
 into Christianity. He failed in believing that 
 you could re-establish an outworn and discarded 
 mythology. Whether Ibsen in the course of his 
 reading came across Montanism, does not much 
 matter. It is sufficient to notice that he puts 
 into the mouth of Maximus the mystic language 
 about the Third Kingdom which resembles the 
 preaching of Montanus, or the later prophecies 
 of Joachim of Flora. What is the Third King- 
 dom ? I do not- think we need seek for political 
 solutions. Ibsen's chief problem at the moment, 
 and for all his years afterwards, was how to 
 reconcile body and spirit, freedom and institu- 
 tions, love and marriage. It is this reconciliation 
 which is to be the work of the Third Kingdom. 
 " The kingdom of the flesh is absorbed in the 
 kingdom of the spirit. But the kingdom of the 
 spirit is no more final than is youth. You have 
 striven to hinder the growth of youth, to prevent 
 him from achieving manhood. Fool I You have 
 drawn your sword against that which is to be, 
 against the third kingdom in which the twin- 
 natured shall reign." 
 
 In Emperor and Galilean Ibsen is forced, by 
 the exigencies of his subject, to use language far 
 more theological even than in Brand, but the 
 problem he deals with is still more religious and 
 
 91 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 ethical than properly a theological one, or rather 
 it is mystical. The idea of a Third Kingdom is 
 connected, in the Symposium scene in Ccesar's 
 Apostasy, with the union with the Pure Woman ; 
 and it is typical of Ibsen's irony that he makes 
 Julian find his ideal in Helena, whom the poet 
 represents (with no authority from history) as 
 unfaithful. Again we have a hint of the return 
 of this motive in Julian's meeting with Makrina ; 
 but it is a motive that yields altogether in 
 significance to the idea of the kingdom of 
 reconciliation. At the end of the play Ibsen 
 represents Julian as " a scourge of God," and he 
 has foreshadowed this in the obvious imphcation, 
 in the Symposium scene, that Julian will stand 
 with Cain and Judas. This is the other great 
 motive of the play, freedom under necessity. 
 Ibsen is no nearer solving the problem of free- 
 will and predestination than any of his pre- 
 decessors or successors : it is, as man is slowly 
 coming to realize, that problem which we are 
 required simply to state, not to solve. He is, 
 however, on the right lines in his play, as his 
 letters to Brandes at this period show. Brandes 
 accused him of "thorough-going determinism," 
 and Ibsen, without rebutting the charge, points 
 out that what he has said is " he is free — under 
 necessity." That is, all he has done is to take 
 a highly exaggerated instance of the man whose 
 
 92 
 
EMPEROR AND GALILEAN 
 
 actions do seem " determined." It is difficult to 
 see what purpose Julian served except that of a 
 " corner-stone of necessity," but Ibsen does not 
 state that Julian's action was inevitable ; he 
 avoids that, and only says that after he made his 
 decision to revive paganism the World- Will over- 
 ruled him. 
 
 The problem of determinism, in different 
 forms — the influence of heredity and environ- 
 ment — was to occupy Ibsen again ; but he is, 
 after this, perfectly clear about the freedom of 
 the will. If Helmer is "determined" Nora is 
 essentially " free " ; if Oswald is the slave of 
 heredity his mother has broken free from her 
 environment ; and if Gregers is the creature of 
 his ideals, Gina is the maker and sustainer of her 
 own life. 
 
 Emperor and Galilean had then an import- 
 ance for Ibsen which it can never have for his 
 readers. The first play is easy to read, vivid 
 and enlightening in its action, bold and truthful 
 in its characterization ; but the second, which 
 certainly meant more to the author, is tedious 
 both in language and action. Julian's character 
 is stationary during the whole play; he rules 
 like a prig and talks like a pedant. And when 
 once we have grasped the poet's meaning with 
 regard to the Third Kingdom, and to JuKan's 
 position under the World- Will, we get very 
 
 93 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 weary of the perpetual recurrence of the two 
 ideas. They seem to be new to the author, and 
 we wonder if the poet repeats them merely in 
 order to convince himself. The two plays served 
 their purpose in enabling Ibsen to get on paper 
 ideas that he only formulated as he wrote, some 
 of which indeed are formulated properly only 
 in his later plays. But his world-drama is 
 memorable as remaining for its author a source 
 of inspiration, a treasure-house in whose ideas 
 he was to find encouragement for "that life- 
 work which I firmly believe and know God has 
 given me to do." 
 
 94 
 
THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH: 
 
 THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY: 
 
 A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 The people at home think parochially, feel parochially, and regard 
 everything from a parochial point of view. 1873. 
 
 There come great and beautiful moments when you see with joy and 
 certainty where right lies. 1873. 
 
 The League of Youth is the first play in 
 which Ibsen used modern prose language, and 
 dealt with a modern "prose" problem. This 
 fact alone would render the play of interest, 
 even apart from its technical merits. These, 
 I fancy, have been rather exaggerated. It is 
 true that any play which deals with a situation 
 in Norwegian politics somewhere about the year 
 1869 is at a disadvantage in appealing to an 
 audience demote both in time and place. Its 
 reception was stormy — recalling indeed to us 
 the reception of Synge's Playboy of the Western 
 World in Dublin — but Ibsen's drama was not 
 occupied with a theme so startling or with 
 characters so real as Synge's. A complaint 
 which Brandes brings against Brand, that the 
 characters fall into categories, may be made far 
 more truly against The League of Youth. You 
 have the demagogue who is ready to lick the 
 
 95 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 boots of the conservatives while he flatters the 
 ears of the mob ; you have the typical conserva- 
 tive middle - class man of position ; you have 
 his son, quietly disregarding his father's ideals ; 
 you have the gutter journalist ; the easy widow 
 and the amiable family friend. Against these 
 one may put one original character, Selma, 
 Bratsberg's daughter-in-law, wife of his un- 
 dutiful son. When Erik hears that his schemes 
 have failed and that he will lose his fortune, he 
 turns to Selma for help ; and Selma makes the 
 reply in which Brandes, with acute insight, saw 
 the germ of A Doll's Hoitse. 
 
 How I have thirsted for a single drop of your troubles, 
 your anxieties ! But when I begged for it you only put 
 me off with a laugh. You have dressed me up like 
 a doll; you have played with me as you would have 
 played with a child. Oh ! what a joy it would have been 
 to me to take my share in your burdens ! How I longed, 
 how I yearned for a big and high and strenuous part in 
 life ! Now, Erik, you come to me, now that you have 
 nothing else left. But I will not be treated simply as 
 a last resource. I will have nothing to do with your 
 troubles now. I won''t stay with you. I would rather 
 play and sing in the streets. Let me alone! Let me 
 alone ! 
 
 That is certainly the most significant passage 
 in the play. Whether Ibsen had grasped its 
 whole significance we may doubt ; he certainly 
 
 96 
 
THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY 
 
 preferred to leave the problem alone until his 
 powers were maturer and his views more deter- 
 mined. For the rest, The League of Youth is 
 a forcible diatribe against the spirit of party- 
 politics ; and its satire is, perhaps, as applicable 
 to Sheffield as to Bratsberg's town. But the 
 play disappoints in its weak grip on character. 
 The climax, when the beaten Stensgard leaves in 
 disgrace, does not make one feel that he is any 
 better or any worse than the people who have 
 beaten him. All are alike puppets, moved with 
 remarkable skill, but not with the consummate 
 mastery that Sir Arthur Pinero for instance 
 uses in dealing with equally unreal material ; 
 and there is nothing in action and little in speech 
 which approaches the incomparable naturalness 
 of Ibsen's later plays. 
 
 The Pillars of Society, published eight years 
 later, is a far truer and abler production. It is 
 not only technically more excellent, but the 
 characters have an interest for us which is not 
 that of mere light comedy. None of them, it is 
 true, takes a place in the front rank of Ibsen's 
 men and women ; but they have a reality and 
 a conviction which belong to the people of no 
 other dramatist of his age. In reading it we 
 must recall again the fact that between its 
 composition and that of The League of Youth 
 had occurred the achievement of Emperor and 
 a 97 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Galilean, and a visit to his own country, the 
 first made since his departure in 1864. I have 
 already referred to the influence of locaUty on 
 Ibsen's genius : that he was susceptible to place, 
 like a great many artists, he himself realized 
 acutely. He says in a letter to Peter Hansen, 
 from which I have quoted before : " Environ- 
 ment has a great influence upon the poems 
 which the imagination creates. Can I not, in 
 the style of ChristofF in Jakob von Tyhoe, point 
 at Brarid and Peer Gyiit, and say, ' Behold ! 
 wine did this ' ? And is there not something in 
 The League of Youth which reminds one of 
 sausages and beer ? I do not intend by this to 
 place the last-mentioned play on a lower level, 
 I only mean that my point of view has changed, 
 because here [in Dresden] I am in a community 
 well-ordered even to exhaustion. What on 
 earth will happen when I reach home 1 " Well, 
 he did not "reach home" tiU 1874, and then 
 was only there for the summer ; and it was 
 three years before his visit bore any dramatic 
 fruit. The difference between The Pillars of 
 Society and The League of Youth is to my mind 
 exactly what might be expected between a play 
 written on a subject in which the author's interest 
 was largely technical and "artistic," and a sub- 
 ject in which he found not only his artistic but his 
 spiritual and intellectual energies aroused. After^ 
 
 98 / 
 
 / 
 
THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY 
 
 all, dealing with political problems was never 
 Ibsen's metier — how quickly he escapes from 
 generalization in Bosmersholm — and he obviously 
 has a far more vivid sense of his characters, a 
 far keener interest in their behaviour in this play 
 which he began the year after his visit to Norway, 
 when all his analytical capacity was still quick 
 with the new people and new interests he had met. 
 It is true that The Pillars of Society suffers a 
 little from the over-dominance of the story. The 
 characters do not really develop their own fate 
 in the thrilling way to which Ibsen accustomed 
 us in hi^ later plays. All, except perhaps 
 Bornick himself, are overburdened with their 
 position in the machinery of the drama ; we 
 find ourselves at times actually following the 
 story apart from the people, even forgetting the 
 people, until some new and fresher speech 
 recalls our attention, in the details of the plot. 
 It is not surprising that the play was a great 
 acting success. It is full of sound workmanship 
 and has innumerable good scenes which are at the 
 same time entirely natural. What can be better, 
 theoretically, and what truer to the situation 
 than the curtain of the third act when Bornick 
 answers from his office Krap's anxious query : — 
 
 Excuse my coming again, Count, but it's blowing up 
 to a hurricane. ... Is the Indian Girl to sail in spite of 
 it ? [After a short pause.] 
 
 BoKNiCK. The Indian Girl is to sail in spite of it. 
 99 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 It is easy to see how that would still thrill an 
 audience who knew that Bornick's brother-in- 
 law, whom he has wronged, is to sail on the 
 boat, and who suspected that his son was going 
 to run away to it. And that act has already 
 had two scenes, that between Bornick and 
 Rorlund, and again between Johan, Dina, and 
 Rorlund, which would make the fortune of any 
 ordinary play. 
 
 In spite of its admirable qualities, however, 
 the play does not hold us quite so magically as 
 others of Ibsen's. I think this may partly be 
 due to a certain hardness of treatment, which 
 has not (as, for instance, in sHedda Gabler) the 
 corollary of strength. The play is really, with 
 its happy ending and its conventional characters, 
 a sentimental play of the old school, written by 
 a man whose insight into human motives and 
 character surpassed any of the old-school drama- 
 tists. The result is an unfortunate cleavage 
 between the characters and their environment ; 
 the dramatis personae are a generation ahead of 
 their play; they have strayed, somehow, into 
 the wrong theatre, and we cannot help feeling 
 that they have learnt the wrong parts and 
 borrowed an alien business. It is for this reason 
 that we are not as moved as we should be by 
 the relations between Bornick, Betty and Lona, 
 or between Martha and Johan. Lona, it is true, 
 
 100 
 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 is not at all a woman who has taken to indepen- 
 dence owing to the desertion of her lover, nor 
 is Betty the ordinary wife of domestic comedy. 
 But we do not feel that Lona Hessel is quite 
 of a piece ; she is scarcely the same character 
 in the last act as in the first; she gets off 
 the stage and on to the platform, a tendency 
 shared, in a less degree, by Betty and Martha. 
 Still in the relationships of these characters we 
 have evidence that Ibsen has not changed his 
 mind as to the fact of atonement : he has no 
 doubts about its possibiUty and its occurrence. 
 It is through Lona that Bomick saves his soul, 
 and it is through Lona and Martha that .lohan 
 keeps his self-respect and attains his happiness. 
 Ibsen may be an individualist, but he is always 
 an individualist a deux : he may have his doubts 
 about "communities," he has none about com- 
 radeship. 
 
 Two years after The Pillars of Society, appeared 
 the play by which alone a great many English 
 people know Ibsen's name. It is not easy to 
 recollect that A Doll's House is now thirty- 
 three years old. I have heard it said by a 
 modern young man, after seeing a recent per- 
 formance, that the play seemed perfectly ordi- 
 nary, to contain nothing that anyone would 
 object to. Yet, every day, "marriages" are 
 entered upon exactly like Torvald's and Nora's, 
 
 101 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 every day men go home to wives who share 
 nothing but their physical and emotional life, 
 who have no interest in or knowledge of their 
 business, their politics or their pleasures. And 
 when we remember that Brieux in Les Trois 
 Filles de M. Dupont puts into his heroine's 
 mouth speeches that might have been uttered 
 by Selma or Nora, I think we should be chary 
 in agreeing that ^Dnlffi TTmisp inf;.^ ilnatp.s 
 nothing butJBrhat every one .a ccepts. The truth 
 isthat with the alarming growth of a tolerance, 
 based on indifference and bolstered by ignorance, 
 any ideas, held with sufficient strength by a 
 reasonably intelligent and forcible group of 
 people, will nowadays gain — not acceptance, nor 
 agreement, but the right to go unnoticed. And 
 the ideas of A DoWs House no longer meet with 
 disapproval simply because, like so many other 
 matters of importance, they no longer meet with 
 intelligent interest. 
 
 ^ For me the only weakness in A Doll's House 
 is the character_or*Torvald Helmer. TEctci is. 
 no doubt that here Ibsen suffers from pro- 
 vinciality, a charge often brought against him 
 without any justification. It is not, however, 
 provinciality of thought : that the poet of Peer 
 Gynt could never be guilty of; it is a pro- 
 vinciality of experience. Torvald is such aprig, 
 so hopelessly and utterly unfit to be the hus- 
 
 102 
 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 band of Nora at any stage of her development, 
 that one feels almost as soon as the play begins 
 and Nora is nibbling her macaroons, that she 
 would never have lived with the creature for 
 eight years. It is not merely the fact that Nora's 
 character develops during the play that makes me 
 feel that Torvald was always, socially and tem- 
 peramentally, below his wife ; even while she is 
 still the "song-bird," we feel that there is a 
 vulgarity about her husband that makes the 
 union essentially unfitting. There is no reason 
 to suppose that Ibsen wished Torvald to have 
 an unpleasant effect on the audience ; because 
 the play would obviously gain enormously if he 
 were more of a gentleman. And it is true 
 that some critics seem satisfied with Torvald ; 
 Brandes, for instance, says, "What is specially 
 fine and deUcate in A DolVs House was that 
 Ibsen had granted so much to the husband. 
 What had he not conceded to him ! The man 
 is thoroughly honourable, scrupulously upright, 
 thrifty, careful of his position in the eyes of 
 strangers and inferiors, a faithful husband, a 
 strict and loving father, kind-hearted, cultured," 
 and so on. It is surely the oddest list of virtues 
 — some are merely deduced from, not stated, in 
 the play — to set against the fact that the man 
 is, in a crisis, a cad. In short Brandes' criticism 
 here shows strong traces of the " Copenhagen- 
 
 103 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 ism" of which Ibsen once accused him in 
 another connection. His description of Torvald 
 could only have come from a man accustomed 
 to the Continental conventions about the posi- 
 tion of wives, which, in ordinary society at 
 least, have always been narrower than ours in 
 England.^ 
 
 Putting aside, however, the repugnance with 
 which Torvald Helmer has always inspired me, 
 I feel that in A Doll's House we still have 
 an acute and able presentation of a difficult 
 problem. " Problem " is a dangerous word, and 
 I believe nothing does more harm to Ibsen's 
 reputation than the generalizations his disciples 
 have made. Ibsen does not state general cases. 
 He is not concerned here with the problem of 
 a man and a woman, mated for pleasure, whom 
 a great crisis overtakes ; he is concerned with 
 two very real people, Torvald Helmer and 
 Nora who, eight years before the play begins, 
 married him. Nothing that Nora says is any- 
 thing but peculiar to her character and her 
 case ; and her case depends on her character, 
 on Torvald's character, on her father's — on a 
 hundred little things that Ibsen introduces. 
 When Ibsen, bored with some ethical question, 
 
 > I ought to say, in justice to Dr. Brandes, that in his later 
 "impression" of Ibsen (sixteen years after the date of the judg- 
 ment I have quoted) he calls Torvald Helmer " a worthy snob." 
 
 104 
 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 grumbled that his business was to ask questions, 
 he stated once for all what you can only forget 
 at your peril in reading him. He does ask 
 questions : that is he presents a situation, a life 
 between live people, and their tragedy or 
 comedy forces the question to our lips and his. 
 The problem of A Doll's House is not should 
 wives desert their husbands, any more than it is 
 should wives forge ; it is. What would you have 
 Nora do, you moralists ? Look ! this is how it 
 was — thus and thus. Now : ought she to go or to 
 stay ? That this is forgotten is certain from the 
 fact that many people still talk about A Doll's 
 House as " an attack upon marriage " ; whereas 
 the whole point of the play is whether Torvald 
 and Nora are married or not. Nora is sure she 
 is not, and Torvald, at the end, is he altogether 
 certain where the truth lies? The play goes 
 much deeper than any enquiry into marriage 
 customs, or laws ; these can never have in- 
 terested Ibsen. Its real enquiry is into what 
 makes any relationship possible between human 
 beings, what is it that sanctifies or degrades the 
 union between one human being and another ? 
 
 In the scene between Torvald and Nora in 
 the last act there are three sentences of hers 
 and one of his which embody the three chief 
 difficulties of the play, the three questions which 
 Ibsen asks, the three questions which, even if 
 
 105 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 he does not hide his sympathies, he leaves to us 
 to answer. 
 
 When Torvald has read Krogstad's letter he 
 exclaims against Nora : " During all these eight 
 years she who was my pride and my joy — a 
 hypocrite, a liar — worse, worse — a criminal 1 " To 
 that we have later on Nora's unconscious retort. 
 
 " It appears that a woman has no right to 
 spare her dying father, or to save her husband's 
 life ! I do not believe that. ... 1 must make 
 up my mind which is right — society or I." 
 
 Then we have Nora's statement : " I believe 
 that before all else I am a human being, or at 
 least that I should try to become one." 
 
 And then, in answer to Torvald's, " No man 
 sacrifices his honour, even for one he loves," is 
 Nora's staggering reply : " Millions of women 
 have done so." 
 
 The first of those problems, though it loomed 
 large to Ibsen and to Nora, has been rather 
 neglected in comparison to the other two. Ibsen 
 at this time was evidently as heartily anti-state 
 as ever : the state was the curse of the in- 
 dividual, the enemy that must be destroyed. 
 The worst of this is that, like so many haters, 
 Ibsen assigns more power to this idea than it 
 really possesses in the ordinary man's mind. I 
 have never met any one yet, of the type con- 
 veniently called "man of the world," who did 
 
 106 
 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 not consider the point about the forgery a 
 storm in a tea-cup, and Torvald's behaviour 
 over it as only explicable on the grounds that 
 he was a cad. Ibsen contrives very ingeniously 
 that Nora's extreme fear of the law, following 
 on her extreme ignorance, should seem natural ; 
 but for English readers Torvald's despicable 
 running up of the scale, and ending in " criminal " 
 is entirely incredible. 1 do not mean that there 
 are not circles of society in England which 
 would prefer a woman or a man to break all 
 the commandments sooner than one law ; but 
 even in those circles you would find with diffi- 
 culty a man, still passionately in love with his 
 wife, condemning her in the way Torvald con- 
 demns Nora. His attitude, too, becomes less 
 natural when, after reading Krogstad's second 
 letter, he excuses his language as uttered in the 
 hastiness of anger. If he had really been so 
 hard in grain that " criminal " would have made 
 the natural climax of his abuse he would not 
 have omitted to improve the occasion, not as he 
 does, but by the bullying methods inseparable 
 from the temperament that puts law above 
 justice and respectability above righteousness. 
 To my mind the whole question of the state 
 against the individual has been rather pulled 
 into the play, with the result of dividing our 
 interest without, at the same time, producing 
 
 107 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 a statement of the problem that we can really 
 regard as particularly valuable. 
 
 The questions that are asked in the other 
 clarion challenges divided, and still divide, many 
 who would agree in their answering to the first 
 by a thoroughgoing defence of Nora. Ibsen has 
 often been misjudged with regard to the first of 
 these two — the necessity for self-realization — by 
 those who were ignorant of his previous work. 
 It is odd that one should be called upon to say 
 that the author of Peer Gynt is not an advocate 
 of selfishness, that the creator of Agnes could 
 hardly draw with evident sympathy the picture 
 of a woman who for a whim or a phrase, would 
 desert her children and her husband. I have 
 already pointed out the danger of trying to 
 make an abstract question out of Nora's prob- 
 lem ; the question is, what ought she to do ? 
 Now if we remember what sort of a creation she 
 is, neither child nor woman nor animal, we can 
 hardly hesitate in our answer. Nora's critics 
 have said : She may not have been ready for 
 marriage, or fit for childbearing ; but she in- 
 curred both responsibilities and she ought not to 
 desert her post. It sounds plausible ; but really 
 has no relation to the facts. Nora was not unfit 
 for marriage ; she, the spoilt daughter of a self- 
 indulgent old wastrel, was incapable of it. But 
 her children? There are some women, no doubt, 
 
 108 
 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 to whom child-birth and child -nurture give 
 wisdom and add experience. But Nora was not 
 one of these, she played with her children as 
 her father had played with her ; she is a 
 person with no responsibilities, because she has 
 never been allowed to have any duties. The 
 truth is Ibsen has cut away the ground from the 
 feet of his critics ; no amount of theorizing, no 
 amount of lecturing on the duties of home-life, 
 or the converting effect of a common, tragic ex- 
 perience can overcome the stinging pathos of 
 Nora's " Oh, Torvald, you are not the man to 
 teach me to be a fit wife for you," and her 
 "And I — how have I prepared myself to edu- 
 cate the children ? " 
 
 There is another aspect of this question of 
 self-realization which deserves comment. Who, 
 after all, are the people who object to another, 
 to a Nora, educating herself before she attempts 
 to enter on other duties? What, precisely, is 
 Torvald's relation to a human being to whom he 
 would deny the right of finding her soul ? It is 
 all to Torvald Helmer's advantage, from a low 
 point of view, that Nora should remain "the 
 chUd." It wiU be less trouble for him to live 
 with a person whom he will merely have to 
 cherish and to chide, than to live with one with 
 whom he will have to adjust and readjust his re- 
 lationship. If Nora achieves personality and 
 
 109 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 self-expression Torvald's home-life will become 
 almost as serious as his business experiences ; he 
 will have to take nearly as much trouble in talk- 
 ing to his wife as he does in talking to his 
 cashier or his clerk. He will have to discover 
 some common measure, in short, between his 
 wife's character and his own. Up to the present 
 the common measure has simply been his con- 
 descending affection, and her view of it — a view 
 unexpressed and so in consequence regarded by 
 both Torvald and Nora as identical with his. 
 Then the situation is this, that the man who 
 objects to Nora's self-realization, as something 
 incredibly selfish and egotistic, is only realizing 
 his own self at the expense of her character. 
 This may seem fairly obvious, but I have found 
 people who still insist that Nora is selfish, far 
 more selfish than Torvald, because he at any 
 rate is willing to give himself to her. They do 
 not see that Torvald's giving is only a form of 
 selfishness, that he gets out of his affection for 
 \ Nora a happiness and a contentment far in ad- 
 vance of anything which he gives to her. She is, 
 I in short, for him a means of self-expression ; he, 
 I for her, a check to self-realization. It was no 
 doubt recognition of this which made Ibsen in- 
 troduce the third problem into the drama. 
 
 The last sentence that I quoted as a kind of 
 keynote to the play is the only one in it where 
 
 110 
 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 Nora (and possibly Ibsen) seems to be intro- 
 ducing what is known as "feminism." The 
 other problems in the play are distinctly prob- 
 lems between Torvald and Nora ; there is 
 nothing in her point of view which a man could 
 not hold, there is nothing in his which many 
 women would not accept. But with her "Millions 
 of women have done so," Nora drops a barrier 
 between her sex and her husband's. She feels 
 that here, at last, in this bold statement of the 
 icomplete supremacy and predominance of love, 
 |she has her sex on her side. When the play was 
 written, I daresay that most men felt that Tor- 
 vald with his "No man sacrifices his honour, 
 even for one he loves," had his sex on his side. 
 I feel sure that it was the only sentence of Tor- 
 vald's in that great duologue which made the 
 man in the stalls think "Ah! well, the fellow has 
 got some stuff in him after all ! " The sentiment 
 aroused pleasant recollections of 
 
 " I could not love theCj Dear, so much 
 Loved I not honour more." 
 
 I can see hundreds of men in theatres all over 
 the world, during the pause after Torvald's sen- 
 tence, thinking " Well, what can she say to 
 that ? " And breaking their expectancy, shatter- 
 ing their confidence, came Nora's reply. And 
 what answer can man make ? We know Tor- 
 
 111 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 vald could not answer at all : his " You think, 
 'i you speak like a foolish child " is the stuttering 
 . anger of a man who has had the foundation of 
 'I his world shaken. He has no answer to Nora's 
 I challenge. Although I believe as firmly as any- 
 one that there is only one certain difference be- 
 tween a man and a woman, and that is that he 
 is man and she is woman ; though I am con- 
 vinced you cannot with safety and fairness or 
 honesty, legislate, or generalize or philosophize 
 on the assumption that certain qualities are 
 found in women, and other certain in men ; yet 
 I think it is foolish always to hesitate, even at 
 the risk of making mistakes, from assuming that 
 certain qualities, while not in the least proper or 
 inseparable, are more often found in women 
 than in men. And among the qualities which 
 hitherto have distinguished man as apart from 
 woman is the point of " honour." There was 
 a time when in war between nations honour 
 was almost the first consideration. Elizabeth's 
 foreign policy has a quality that we may call 
 feminine. She did not object, perhaps, to 
 honour, but she wanted peace and prosperity 
 more. It is significant that the lady of Suck- 
 ling's ballad is evidently not expected to enjoy 
 her cavalier's sentiments ; and in one of the most 
 popular modern re-renderings of the disgusting 
 idea of sacrificing a woman's happiness to the 
 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 
 
 needs of a pinchbeck dynasty it is the woman 
 who would willingly leave Ruritania and its 
 throne. Perhaps the commonest example of 
 this difference between the sexes is the broken 
 engagement. Does a girl ever insist on going 
 through with an engagement and marrying a 
 man she does not love because she has pledged 
 her word ? Yet many men have done so, and 
 ruined their own lives and their wives' ; or re- 
 duced both their own and their wives' ideals 
 of marriage to a not uncomfortable domestic 
 amiability. 
 
 Yet that on this point, too, of loveagamst 
 h^iouiv we have changed a little is, I think, 
 shown largely by the altered attitude about 
 keeping the "plighted troth." It would be 
 difficult now to be in any company of educated 
 people and not find two or three men vehement 
 in denouncing the character of a man who 
 marries without love, from a mistaken sense of 
 honour. However much he might incur blame 
 for having made his blunder, he would not now 
 be invariably regarded as concluding matters 
 satisfactorily by adding deception to his original 
 mistake. 
 
 It may of course be argued that this contest 
 of love against honour is a false antithesis ; that 
 the quarrel never arises when the honour is dis- 
 interested and the love complete ; that honour 
 H 113 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 is only a branch of afiFectioii, a younger sister 
 of that amity which is the basis of all human 
 relationships and which is best typified bj' mar- 
 riage. One would not want to disagree with 
 this ; but it is really beside the point. What 
 Ibsen had to deal with, yet again, was not 
 abstract problems, but problems as they bore on 
 his two poor children, Torvald and Nora. And 
 on the top of all the distinctive trials that afflict 
 Nora, on the top of all the uncertainties and the 
 agonies and the vain, brave hopes that are her 
 own lovable and peculiar heritage, comes this 
 one staggering difference that arises between 
 her as a woman and Torvald as a man : that his 
 love is not the final thing, not the background 
 of his own life, not that which gives richness 
 and meaning to everything else, but a sentiment 
 that has its due and decorous place in a carefully 
 uarded social convention, and torn away from 
 hat strikes him with nothing but anger and 
 mazement. 
 
 ij' 
 
 c^f V"^- 
 
 114 
 
VI 
 
 GHOSTS: AN ENEMY OF 
 THE PEOPLE: THE WILD DUCK 
 
 Anything rather than the present state of affairs — so say I. 1872. 
 The minority is always in the right. 1872. 
 
 Who will vouch for it that two and two do not make five up in 
 Jupiter f 1870. 
 
 About the terror and power of Ghosts there 
 can be no two opinions. It is impossible, — I 
 have just tried it, — to read, though it be the 
 tenth time of reading, the_awful scene between 
 RegLna, Oswald and his mother at the end of 
 the play without feeling that one is in the merci- 
 less grip of a tragedy almost intolerable. The 
 bare clean speech, the absolute economy of 
 action, the frightful deliberation ; the inevitable 
 approach of the climax have the same power 
 to move us as when the play was new. It seems 
 almost incredible that people should have been 
 moved to anger instead of to pity and tears ; 
 it is true, by the action of the Censor, Ghosts 
 has never been presented for public perform- 
 ance in England ; but, if we may judge from 
 the reception of private performances, our critics, 
 accustomed to Lear and Hamlet, could see 
 nothing but the disgusting fancies of an obscene 
 playwright in the tragedy of Ghosts. I suppose 
 
 115 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 dramatic critics are, as a class, more ignorant 
 of religious feeling than any other body of men ; 
 their notion of reverence, if 1 may judge by 
 many notices of Mr. Shaw's plays, is to abstain 
 from quoting the Bible, particularly if your quo- 
 tation is apposite to the occasion and appropriate 
 to the person. So they attacked G-hosts in the 
 name of religion and morality. Yet if Ghosts 
 has any fault it is that it is didactic, and tha/t^it 
 teaches the old lesson that "the fathers have 
 eaten sour grapes and the children's "teeth are 
 set on edge." Ghosts is a picturfi of the conse - 
 quences of eviL-liYing. 
 
 I have never seen any explanation of why 
 Ibsen, during the years that saw the production 
 of A Doll's House and Ghosts, was peculiarly 
 interested in heredity. The subject had always 
 had a place in his dramas. It is conspicuous in 
 Peer Gynt, and perhaps not absent from The 
 Pillars of Society. But in A Doll's House and 
 Ghosts he is particularly concerned with it, and 
 with one particular side of the problem, that 
 is, the hereditary transmission of sexual disease. 
 I made no reference to Dr. Ranke in writ^ig 
 about A Doll's House. The truth is his place 
 in the drama has always puzzled me a little. 
 He is there partly, perhaps, because in a house- 
 hold hke the Helmers' there would be sure to be 
 another man ; and partly because he serves as 
 
 116 
 
GHOSTS 
 
 a foil to the pomposity of Torvald and the quiet 
 of Nora. Yet his chief purpose, in Ibsen's mind, 
 was, I believe, that he should make plain to the 
 audience the awful power of heredity. Nora 
 is her father's child, though she is represented 
 as far more the victim of environment than of 
 heredity : but look, says Ibsen, heredity has its 
 victims even more tragic than false up-bringing. 
 So Dr. Ranke goes through the play, an object- 
 lesson, almost a threat. 
 
 The problem that Ibsen touched in this 
 character received its full treatment in Ghosts. 
 Ghosts is called a family-drama. Mrs. Alving, 
 Oswald, Regina, Regina's supposed father and 
 Pastor Manders are all the characters ; the action 
 of the play is continuous, and the scene unchanged. 
 The play has the simplicity and directness of a 
 Greek drama ; there is an entire absence of any 
 decorative detail ; gaunt, severe and unrelenting 
 the story grows upon the stage from the first 
 whisper of Regina to the final murmur of 
 Oswald. I do not think that it is a just com- 
 plaint to say that Ghosts is lacking in richness 
 and poetry : it is true, but the presence of more 
 poetry or any greater wealth of treatment would 
 have spoiled the play. When you have a prob- 
 lem as plain and direct as that with which Ghosts 
 deals, anything but the simplest treatment is, I 
 am sure, a mistake. Besides Ibsen has not left 
 
 117 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 the tragedy entirely unrelieved. To have had 
 Oswald's fate presented by itself would have 
 been too much for any human being to stand ; 
 the horror of the thing would have overcome 
 any audience. Also there would scarcely have 
 been that element of intellectual conflict, with- 
 out which the highest drarn a is impo ssible. That 
 element is suppUed In the problem of Mrs. 
 Alving. Here Ghosts is almost a sequel to 
 A DoWs House. Mrs. Aivirig'is the wife of a 
 man — bought by him, as she puts it — for whom 
 she has no affection. She discovers her mistake 
 and her husband's character, which is that of a 
 reprobate, within a year of their marriage, flees 
 from her home, and takes refuge with Pastor 
 Manders, her friend and the man she loves. 
 He lectures, upbraids and sends her back to 
 a man who has not got it in him to repent 
 or to reform : and from that return of Helen 
 Alving spring Ghosts. In all Ibsen's work 
 there is perhaps nothing subtler than the 
 way in which he shows that Pastor Manders isl^ 
 really responsible not only for Oswald's birth, | 
 but also for the lying struggle to keep up appear- : 
 ances, for the atmosphere of deceit in which (,' 
 Oswald had been reared, and for the consequences 
 of that atmosphere on Mrs. Alving mrd on_^ 
 Oswald. It is said that Ibisen use3~to IJe par- 
 ticularly insistent that Mrs. Alving's opinions 
 
 118 
 
GHOSTS 
 
 were her own, and not his : and we must always 
 guard against the danger of crediting a dramatist 
 with his characters' convictions. But I cannot 
 believe that Ibsen did not think, as most decent 
 men would, that Manders was an arrant coward 
 to send back Helen to her husband. That sort 
 of action is always based on a misuse of the 
 convention or the standard for which the Man- 
 derses of the world profess to stand. If the 
 relationship between Alving and his wife were so 
 sacred that no filthy behaviour on his part could 
 justify her leaving him, then what right had 
 Manders to interfere between them? What 
 right has he to use the influence which he only 
 possesses because Mrs. Alving feels towards him 
 as, by his standards, no married woman ought to 
 feel ? It is only by breaking his own rules that 
 he can force the woman to keep them ; it is only 
 by overstepping the boundary that he can push 
 her back within the confines. Tljatis the radical 
 fallacy of Manders' position : it is a position which 
 men who are'aiccilstomed to rule very often 
 adopt ; adopt no doubt unconsciously until some 
 Mrs. Alving opens their eyes. 
 
 It is perhaps as well to say here something 
 about the subject of Ghosts. It is quite evident 
 that hereditary disease could be made most 
 objectionable and offensive on the stage. It is 
 possibly still needful to remind my readers that 
 
 119 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Ibsen is extraordinarily sparing of any horrors or 
 physically terrible things in his plays. I do not 
 mean to deny that it is legitimate to bring 
 horrible action on to the stage ; it has been 
 successfully done by great dramatists. Ibsen, 
 however, has been often accused, in such vague 
 terms, of indecency and obscenity, that you still 
 find a fevir people who are unwilling to believe 
 that there are many of his plays in which death 
 is an incident, and yet the deaths are not pro- 
 tracted scenes of unbearable suflFering : still more 
 unready are they to credit that the problem of 
 Ghosts is examined with a reticence so striking 
 that captious scientists have refused to recognize 
 Oswald's disease at all. All else that need be 
 said is that, whatever views may be held as to 
 what is legitimate in art, rt^ is obviously bad 
 morality that " gay " living and its consequences 
 should perpetually be represented from the 
 standpoint of modern musical comedy and 
 never from the standpoint of such a play as 
 Ghosts. Owing to the national prudery of Eng- 
 land we have lost the very frank references to 
 sexual disease with which Elizabethan comedy 
 abounded ; and we are left with that most tire- 
 some form of " amusing " play in which the 
 silliest kind of mnuendo has to be underlined by 
 guffaws from the knowing part of the audience. 
 A frank laugh over a Rabelaisian joke or a 
 
 120 
 
GHOSTS 
 
 Decameron story, told in public, be it re- 
 membered, and to an audience of both sexes, 
 is at any rate something human and intelligible ; 
 the laughter, though aided by the impropriety, 
 has its source in the humour of the joke. But 
 the snigger, introduced by Sterne, at undercloth- 
 ing, at furtive aspects of perfectly decent things, 
 at anything which is not usually mentioned, is 
 surely one of the most grievous afflictions that 
 the age of rationalism brought with it. Ibsen, 
 though in these latter plays rarely laughing 
 (but there is a grim humour about Engstrand, 
 Regina's supposed father), is at any rate out- 
 spoken and decent ; he had been asked " Why 
 should not Nora have stayed with her husband," 
 and he answered the question with Ghosts. 
 
 In Ghosts, and in the three plays that followed 
 it, Ibsen carried his favourite thesis of self- 
 realization a step further. He now connects 
 the question with the whole problem of truth. 
 Quite apart from its special subject, Gliosis 
 might be taken as the natural history of the 
 XAe. There is nobody in. the play who has 
 truthful relations with any other -person. Not 
 only has Mrs. Alving's attitudg_t o her husban d 
 and the world and her son been a lie, but so 
 has her attitude to Regina and to TManders. 
 Manders has lied to himself, and liedT about 
 Chamberlain Alvmg, and beeiTlied to by Jacob 
 
 121 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Engstrand. Regina has been lied to by everyone, 
 and is suspicious at the opening of the play 
 about the sincerity of the atmosphere that sur- 
 rounds her. Oswald has been lied to all his life, 
 and has never been truthful, to himself or his 
 mother, about his feelings towards her or his 
 father. The sturdy old scoundrel Engstrand, 
 with his plain IjHug, for his own advantage only, 
 is a positive relief after the tortuous falsehoods 
 of all the other characters. 
 
 Yet no unnecessary lies (except Engstrand's) 
 have been told. If any ordinary moralist were 
 posed, one by one, with Helen Alving's case, 
 with Regina's, with Oswald's, with Manders', he 
 would probably say that the lie was pardonable^ 
 It is only when we see the whole monstrous 
 regiment together that we realize the bitterness 
 of the "lie in the soul" which Manders forced 
 on Mrs. Alving. And 'it"TSthiir aspect of the 
 problem whichTSecame most important to Ibsen. 
 His horror of institutions, exaggerated as it 
 often was, enabled-him-to oi,.. ' '^''- huge danger of 
 conventional-tind iiai]iiliai.f twiatioHships. When 
 Manders asks Mrs. Alving, " Have you forgotten 
 that a son ought to love and honour his father 
 and mother ? ", her reply, " Do not let us talk 
 in such general terms. This is the question : 
 Ought Oswald to love and honour Chamberlain 
 Alving ? " opens as big a question as Nora's 
 
 122 
 
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 statement of her primary duty to herself. Ibsen, 
 as a dramatist, rightly puts his question in the 
 particular ; but it can be stated generally, and 
 Pastor Manders makes haste to do so ; he is 
 uneasy, like all half-educated people, when jhe 
 is brought to particulars. "Is there no voice 
 in your mother's heart that forbids you to 
 destroy your son's ideals ? " " What about the 
 truth?" says Mrs. Alving, only to meet with 
 "But what about the ideals?" "Oh, ideals, 
 ideals ! " cries the poor woman, " if only I were 
 not such a coward ! " " Do not despise ideals, 
 Mrs. Alving: they will avenge themselves cruelly." 
 Thus, with infinite art, Ibsen pushes Manders 
 back to apparent victory, yet real defeat. He 
 is compelled to take refuge in an appeal to con- 
 sequences. I do not mean that Ibsen was ever 
 the person to advocate sheer disregard of con- 
 sequences in particular cases ; but it is • plain 
 that Manders is generalizing, and as generaliza- 
 tion his ethics would demand that truth should 
 be primary; t^ii^lnust be told, though the 
 honour of Alving lai.. And he surrenders him- 
 self into Mrs. Alving's hands by advising her to 
 do evil that evil may not come. 
 
 This side of the play was comparatively 
 ignored : yet it is what Ibsen insists upon most 
 in his famous, boisterous answer to his critics, 
 An Enemy of the People. " What you are plead- 
 
 123 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 ing for, you who stick up for Manders, is tamper- 
 ing with truth ; very well, here is what it may 
 come to. If you begin to lie because of ' ideals,' 
 you'll find others lying for interest. Indeed is 
 there any difference, any radical difference, 
 between lying for the sake of spiritual, and 
 lying for the sake of physical, comfort ? " 
 
 This is a bald enough statement of the theme 
 of one of Ibsen's most humorous, genial and 
 popular plays. Dr. Stockmann, who represents 
 Ibsen's views and who, as Mr. Archer says, has 
 carefully been constructed to bear not the slightest 
 resemblance to the dramatist, is one of Ibsen's 
 few male characters who is entirely lovable. 
 Indeed An Enemy of the People is remarkable 
 for its lack of strong feminine interest, a lack 
 which makes the play all the more forcible as 
 an answer to the outcry roused by Ghosts. 
 Ibsen disdained to use against his foes anything 
 less forcible than this strong, impatient, obstinate 
 optimist, who turns gaily from the reform of 
 sewage to the reform of souls ; who beats with 
 equal ardour at the doors of commercial interest 
 and of moral hypocrisy. There is too, I think, 
 significance in his putting into the mouth of a man 
 — and an extremely "manly" man at that, for 
 Stockmann has all the hysterical passion char- 
 acteristic of men who lead in public affairs, and 
 all the vigorous sense that marks the great 
 
 124 
 
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 orator — the defence of a position which hereto- 
 fore in his dramas has been upheld almost ex- 
 clusively by women. It is Lona Hessel who 
 pleads for truth in The Pillars of Society ; it 
 is Nora and again Mrs. Alving who clamour to 
 get free from the burden of conventional false- 
 hood that presses upon them. The men in 
 these three plays are represented as either ac- 
 quiescing or actually profiting by the existence 
 of falsehood. Men, it is true, still occupy that 
 position m An Enemy of the People; but they 
 are now confronted by Thomas Stockmann, a 
 man of twice their energy and ten times their 
 honesty. Stockmann, too, is impatient of his 
 wife's opinion, tenacious of his own and ex- 
 tremely regardless of arguments. It is amusing 
 that in the course of the play Mrs. Stockmann 
 and her husband change round over one of the 
 doctor's most forcibly expressed opinions. In 
 the third act Stockmann boasts " I have the 
 compact majority behind me, you see!" and 
 when Mrs. Stockmann complains " That is just 
 what's so dreadful, that you should have such a 
 horrid thing behind you," he only says "Non- 
 sense, Katrina ; you run home and look after 
 your house, and leave me to take care of society." 
 In the fourth act, in his great speech, Stockmann 
 declares " The most dangerous foe to truth and 
 freedom in our midst is the compact majority," 
 
 125 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 and ends by saying, as Ibsen had said in private 
 eleven years earlier, " The minority is always 
 right." 
 
 It is possible to take too seriously this famous 
 declaration of Ibsen-Stockmann's with its fellow- 
 challenge, "The strongest man in the world is 
 the man who stands most alone." They throw 
 light on one another, for I think at times Ibsen 
 was apt to confuse strength, the strength that 
 comes to a resolute character from loneliness 
 of conviction, with truth. No one was further 
 removed than Ibsen from the crank, but there 
 is a good deal of the -prank in Stockmann ; and 
 both his watchwords lend themselves danger- 
 ously to the crank propaganda. 
 
 I have said that Ibsen never generalizes ; but 
 to this An Enemy of the People is an exception. 
 There is no doubt that in it he not only allows 
 Stockmann to generalize with a far greater free- 
 dom than he usually gives to characters with 
 whom he is evidently in sympathy, but he also 
 allowed his friends, and in a lesser way the public, 
 to know he agreed with Stockmann's generaliza- 
 tions. Yet we must remember that all these 
 generalizations had their origin in a very par- 
 ticular situation. In Ghosts Ibsen had appealed, 
 not consciously perhaps, to the liberals of his 
 country ; he was bitterly disappointed at the 
 timidity with which the official liberals had 
 
 126 
 
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 received the play. Those who were not actively 
 abusive were silent; they "did not dare" to 
 defend the notorious author of Ghosts. All 
 voices, except those of Brandes and Bjornson, 
 were against the poet. Now it was this situa- 
 tion which gave birth to An Enemy of the 
 People; Stockmann's diatribes about the minority 
 are not purely anti-democratic, they are reaUy 
 little more than a statement of what is the 
 obvious fact, that the extreme left generally 
 hates most and is most hated by the official left. 
 In England an obvious illustration would be the 
 attitude of the Socialists to the Liberal party : 
 in Ireland the tension between the Sinn Fein 
 and the official nationalists. Or again, in 
 theology, it is the Broad Churchmen who have 
 most bitterly attacked the Modernists : an 
 academic latitudinarian has less patience with 
 Loisy than even has the Pope. The instinct, of 
 course, is simply self-preservation. Your half- 
 way-house politician, theologian, or moralist sees 
 plainly enough that if the extreme man gets a 
 hearing his occupation is done for : the mild 
 rationalism of George Eliot or Cotter Morrison 
 has a poor chance of survival against the full- 
 blooded paganism of Nietzsche. So naturally 
 enough the official liberals attack the sharp- 
 shooters, "the outposts," as Stockmann calls 
 them ; and the Stockmanns of the world retort 
 
 127 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 by cursing the majority. '^ut it is not the crowd 
 they curse so much as the crowd with the vote; 
 they are enraged against the enfranchized masses, 
 against that large number of people who are 
 educated enough to have a vote but not educated 
 enough to use it. Nothing is more annoying to 
 persons of Ibsen's temperament than to find 
 liberal phrases in the mouths of unideaed people ; . , 
 to discover that there are always some who will 
 follow any movement, however apparently pro- 
 gressive, with the blind attachment that they 
 gave to traditional things ; and by their follow- 
 ing they hold back those of their party who 
 aspire more to influence than to truth, who court 
 the immediate victory rather than the ultimate 
 triumph. 
 
 Ibsen shows his strength in one point where he 
 has been attacked for weakness, namely in making 
 Stockmann's one consistent supporter. Captain 
 Horster, a confessed Philistine in matters political 
 and social. He upholds Stockmann partly no 
 doubt out of a seaman's traditional desire to see 
 the fighter has a good show, but mainly because 
 he is in love with Stockmann's daughter. He 
 is frankly contemptuous of the " friends of the 
 people " who foregather in Stockmann's house ; 
 and he is, in spite of his liking for him, a little 
 apt to laugh at Stockmann himself. He is 
 evidently conventional in ideas, and not at all 
 
 128 
 
AN ENEMY ®F THE PEOPLE 
 
 eager for change. The character ought to have 
 warned those admirers of Ibsen who were 
 presently taken aghast by The Wild Thick. 
 For there is no question that Horster is one of 
 the most favoured characters in the play. To 
 my mind this is only in accordance with Ibsen's 
 previous convictions. Horster has at any rate 
 the supreme virtue — he knows exactly what his 
 relations to people are, and he makes no pretence 
 about them. All his relationships are based on 
 reality, and the fact that this reality is his love 
 for Petra, not any passion for Stockmann's 
 schemes, does not render his essential Tightness 
 any the less. What he does, he does out of a 
 sincere conviction ; indeed he is, in a way, the 
 most sincere, the most genuine person in the play, 
 for the only three who could challenge him have 
 a less direct and certain reality than he. Stock- 
 mann adds to his great sincerity a certain cranki- 
 ness and a wilful obstinacy ; Mrs. Stockmann has 
 leanings, repressed though obvious, to comfort 
 and ease at the expense of truth ; Petra is in 
 danger of becoming rather a little prig, with an 
 over-solicitude for "movements" and "watch- 
 words." Horster alone is "straight," a man 
 without any humbug of any kind, transparently 
 honest and immovably truthful. The will-o'- 
 the-wisp of ideals and the firelight of respect- 
 ability alike appeal in vain to him ; he knows 
 I 129 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 what he wants, and knows how to subordinate 
 even truths to the truth. 
 
 In The Wild Duck Ibsen dealt with a man 
 who, unUke Horster, could not distinguish 
 between truths and the truth. Gregers Werle 
 is a man who generalizes immediately: once 
 anyone tells him a lie, he is a liar, a soldier for 
 him would be a murderer, and also, I should 
 think, the hangman. He has no notion of things 
 in concrete at all ; he deals solely with abstract 
 virtues and vices, and so blunders immediately 
 in his relations with human beings. I cannot 
 for a moment believe that Ibsen thought Gregers 
 was himself. He may have seen, even in his 
 ironic way hoped, that people would take 
 Gregers as a piece of self-portraiture ; he may 
 have actually intended to put Gregers forward 
 as a caricature of his enemies' caricatures of 
 himself; but taken in connection with his other 
 plays, and his other characters, I see no reason 
 to suppose that Gregers represents Ibsen any 
 more than does Tesman or Borkman. There 
 is one slight piece of evidence — it is true little 
 stress is laid on it — which Mr. Archer quotes 
 in defence of the identification of Ibsen and 
 Gregers : namely, Gregers' watchword, "the claim 
 of the ideal." It appears that Ibsen uses this 
 phrase of himself in a letter to Mr. Gosse : but it 
 is more important to see how he uses it in his 
 
 130 
 
TME WIL® ©ETtK 
 
 plays. We have two people who are prominent 
 in talking about the ideal : one is the fool Hial- 
 mar Tonnesen, in The Pillars of Society, the other 
 the coward Manders, in Ghosts. In Ghosts the 
 whole stress of one scene, nay, the whole stress of 
 Mrs. Alving's problem is "Am I to support ideals 
 or the truth ? " and surely there is no doubt on 
 which side the dramatist is. So when he pro- 
 duces a new play in which a character, who 
 blunders from beginning to end, uses this same 
 worn excuse, this dreary alternative to honest 
 thinking, I can see no reason for supposing that 
 the character represents the dramatist. To con- 
 fuse " the ideal " with " the truth " is to mistake 
 the whole meaning of Ibsen's work ; he is per- 
 petually protesting that truth and the ideal are 
 always coming in contact, and that the only 
 sound thing to do is to take refuge in reality. 
 ®f course all criti«s admit that Gregers' action 
 is ill-advised ; but too many have assumed that, 
 in telling Hialmar Ekdal the truth, he is doing 
 something analogous to what Mrs. Alving should 
 have done, had she told her son and the world 
 the truth about her husband. Really there is 
 a huge difference between Hialmar 's action and 
 the action which Manders and Mrs. Alving 
 should have taken. The difference does not 
 lie merely in the fact that, in the case of Ghosts, 
 the truth would have prevented a hideous course 
 
 131 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 of cruelty, while in The Wild Duck the truth 
 only brings unhappiness into a contented if 
 rather foolish household. That is a difference, 
 one that the Gregers of this world should con- 
 sider. But the real difference is much deeper. In 
 Ghosts the actual existence of the Alving family, 
 the whole of the Alving " legend " is based on a 
 lie : just as in ^w Enemy of the People the pros- 
 perity of the Baths is indissolubly bound with 
 the falsehood believed about them. In The Wild 
 Duck Gina's relations with Hialmar, and the 
 affection of both of them for Hedvig, have 
 nothing to do with old Werle's original act of 
 deception. Though Hialmar is a shiftless fool, 
 he is a perfectly happy fool, and his happiness is 
 based on a real intercourse with his wife, and a 
 real affection for his child. To tell him the truth 
 would have, rightly, no sort of permanent effect 
 on his family life, because his family life has 
 never been nourished by the lie ; it has an exist- 
 ence of its own. Nora's life, Helen Alving's 
 life, Consul Bornick's life depended on the lie ; 
 each of them profited, each of them to some 
 extent sold their souls for the lie. Now Hial- 
 mar and Gina gain nothing real from the lie ; 
 part of their material prosperity is due to it, but 
 that does not affect their characters. The only 
 person, indeed, who may be said to gain by the 
 lie is old Werle : and he is not the kind of man 
 
 132 
 
THE WILD DUCK 
 
 to mind the truth, overmuch. He has Hed as 
 much from a sort of careless generosity as from 
 any sinister motives of his own. 
 
 Thus Gregers' action is not only stupid ; it is, 
 at least from the standpoint of the other plays, 
 wrong. How wrong it is he does not ap- 
 parently suspect, even when he has to keep on 
 whipping Hialmar up to remembering the situa- 
 tion, attempting to make him act an "heroic" 
 part towards a woman for whom his feeUngs 
 have not really suffered the slightest alteration, 
 except that he feels a conventional recoil proper 
 to his class at meeting with a conventional 
 offence. But nothing of Hialmar is changed 
 except his sentiments and his speeches ; he 
 keeps on trying to intoxicate himself into a fit 
 of sorrowful anger with Gina, and Gregers 
 endeavours to intoxicate him into a mood of 
 ennoblement ; and all the while, for the first 
 time in his life, Hialmar's real nature is in 
 danger of being tinged by deceit. Mere veracity 
 has brought falsehood in its train ; in the effort 
 to keep step with Gregers' view of truth Hial- 
 mar begins to lose sight of real truth altogether, 
 and it is only the sound of Hedvig's pistol that 
 really shakes him out of his illusion. 
 
 The Wild Duck is then not an attack, or 
 even a satire, on the position Ibsen adopted in 
 his previous plays ; it is instead a restatement of 
 
 133 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 . the same conviction from a different standpoint. 
 
 / It continues the work of An Enemy of the 
 People; there Ibsen attacked the majority of 
 disciples who follow, without thinking, positions 
 that only thought can excuse ; here he attacks 
 the mischievous crank who misinterprets any 
 fresh movement. The cowards and the black- 
 guards and the hypocrites are not the only 
 enemies of truth ; still more mischievous is the 
 man who, before he has learnt to distinguish 
 truth from falsehood, deems himself ready to be 
 a prophet of the real. 
 
 The Wild Duck can, less almost than any of 
 the plays of this period, be reduced, as I have 
 been trying to do, to a bare statement of a 
 problem. There is not a character in it, from 
 Hialmar and Gregers to Molvik, whom we should 
 not recognize immediately, were we to meet 
 them in some provincial town. Ibsen's astound- 
 ing creative power had never been exhibited 
 with such richness, such variety, and such com- 
 plete mastery of his medium. It was a feeling 
 of this, I believe, that made him say of the 
 play, " It occupies a place apart in my dramatic 
 productions ; its method of development is in 
 many respects divergent from that of its prede- 
 cessors." It is very noticeable that with the 
 greater certainty of his plays, culminating in 
 Ghosts, Ibsen had perceptibly narrowed his 
 
 134 
 
THE WILD DUCK 
 
 range ; there is hardly a sentence in Gliosis that 
 does not have a direct influence on the theme. 
 I have felt that in Ghosts Ibsen produces an 
 efiFect not unlike that of three navvies striking 
 at the iron pin that dislodges our London paving- 
 stones. First one character strikes, then 
 another, then the third : but each strikes the 
 same pin, and drives it further in the same 
 direction. The sense of deliberate force and 
 purpose in Ghosts becomes almost unbearable. 
 In The Wild Duck this is altered ; as before 
 there is not a sentence which does not have its 
 influence on the theme, but the influence is 
 rarely direct. The play is just as intense, but 
 it is far freer, far less arranged, far less under 
 the direction of fate — and of the dramatist. 
 The Wild Duck is, then, Ibsen's first play 
 which is wholly " modern," not only in thought 
 but in treatment. For anyone who has seen it, 
 nay for one who has read it, the child's experi- 
 ences come back, and life in the streets seetaa*" 
 infinitely less real and actual than the bitter 
 tragi-comedy of Gregers, Hedvig and Hialmar. 
 The Wild Duck is also noteworthy for being 
 the first of Ibsen's prose plays in which symbol- 
 ism plays a large part. It is true that in Ghosts 
 there is a good deal of rather mysterious business 
 about the uninsured condition of the Orphanage; 
 but I think Ibsen only intended that the stress 
 
 135 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 should be laid on this to throw a further light 
 on Manders' character, to show that he is not 
 able to face criticism even in a matter where he 
 would have got a good deal of support. Dis- 
 missing this, then, as in any case comparatively 
 unimportant, the symbolism in The Wild JJiick 
 is a fresh characteristic of which none of Ibsen's 
 plays in future were entirely to be deprived. 
 In none, perhaps, has he used his symbols so 
 skilfully. There is not a false note from begin- 
 ning to end in all that difficult world of the 
 garret, where the crazy old man is kept alive by 
 memories that are almost hopes. What is so 
 masterly in The Wild Duck is that all the 
 symbolism falls absolutely into the play ; we 
 never suspect, as I do in 2%e Master-Builder, 
 that it is the dramatist's symbolism. It belongs 
 intrinsically to Hedvig and her grandfather; 
 and Gina, with an admirable rightness, serves 
 to keep the symbolic world of the play far from 
 the mistiness of Hauptmann, or the allegorizing 
 of Maeterlinck. Ibsen's symbolism, here, at any 
 rate, has the supreme quality that can alone 
 successfully justify its use — it is a perfect lan- 
 guage. What he expresses by the wild duck 
 could not be expressed so perfectly by words : 
 the symbolism of the play is a real channel of 
 ideas, as true and as fresh as any of the old 
 symbols that men get so used to that they 
 
 136 
 
THE WILD DUCK 
 
 sometimes take them for the reality. It has 
 symbolism's ultimate beauty of being entirely 
 appropriate to the characters and the circum- 
 stances, and it is not a little responsible for the 
 fact that we leave this play with Hedvig's image 
 fixed more definitely on our minds than that of 
 any of the other characters. Hedvig, with her 
 quick, loving temperament, with her alert child's 
 mind, with her deep and passionate girl's nature 
 is the truest and ablest portrait of a child in 
 the whole of dramatic literature ; and her per- 
 fection is very largely due to Ibsen's use of 
 symbols. 
 
 137 
 
VII 
 
 ROSMERSHOLM: THE LADY FROM 
 THE SEA: HEDDA GABLER 
 
 Distinction of soul seems to be on the decline at home. 1882. 
 I miss the sea most. 1880. The old beauty is no longer beautiful. 
 (CcBsar's Apostasy) 1874. 
 
 It is the character of Rebekka, "that Miss 
 West," as the old servant calls her, which saves 
 Bosmersholm from being the most depressing 
 of Ibsen's later plays. It is full, even apart from 
 Rebekka, of keen insight into men and matters ; 
 in Rector KroU we have a picture of the con- 
 ventional man (though KroU is not a cleric, but 
 head of a school) who excels Manders in reality 
 and force ; in Rosmer himself we have a curious 
 portrayal of the man who, with a singular un- 
 fitness for the work, has allowed himself to be 
 dragged into political questions and party war- 
 fare. But all the skill of the play does not suffice 
 to disguise Ibsen's temperamental incapacity to 
 enter with any real patience into political 
 problems. He distrusted and disliked, above 
 all things, the state and its manifestations. He 
 had no aversion from authority, when he was 
 sure the authority was real and worthy : even 
 when it was despotic, as in Russia, he rejoiced, 
 
 138 
 
ROSMERSHOLM 
 
 half-ironically, because of the " splendid oppres- 
 sion that they have, and the love of freedom 
 that it engenders." But Ibsen never believed 
 in political liberties ; and he was probably 
 speaking almost the precise truth when he said 
 that the only thing he loved about liberty was 
 the struggle for it. Now whatever may be 
 thought of these views, it is evident that a man 
 who holds them is not likely to produce an 
 enthralling work, the subject of which is mainly 
 political : and Sosmersholm does suffer from 
 Ibsen's hatred of political forms. It is, how- 
 ever, saved gloriously by Rebekka West. We 
 even forget the struggle between Kroll and 
 Rosmer; we forget Kroll's anxiety over his 
 children and Rosmer's unwillingness to wound 
 his old friend, in watching the manner in which 
 Rosmer and Rebekka are slowly brought to 
 realize the relationship between them ; what it 
 means to them, what it will mean to Kroll and 
 others, what it has meant to Beata, Rosmer's 
 dead wife. In this treatment of the situation 
 between Rosmer and Rebekka Ibsen again shows 
 how far in advance of his party he stood. It 
 is true that he puts some of his boldest things 
 into the mouth of Mortensgard, whom it is 
 difficult to treat with respect ; but stUl Mortens- 
 gard does, once at least, touch what was a real 
 weakness in the advanced people of the eighties. 
 
 139 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Since George Eliot's time it had been the habit 
 to regard it as axiomatic that people who had 
 freed themselves from Christian dogma would 
 remain tied to Christian ethic. But there was, 
 there still is in many quarters, a genuine weak- 
 ness in the position of those who hold that 
 Christian ethic will go on subsisting apart from 
 its dogmatic foundation. New Superman is only 
 old sinner writ large, and rather self-consciously ; 
 and it is not easy to distinguish between the old- 
 fashioned libertine and the prophet of the New 
 Age, except that the libertine had pluck. 
 
 Rosmer is a man of no humour, little passion, 
 and rather vaguely quiet affections, who has not 
 noticed himself being loved by a woman of 
 exceptional character and strongly passionate 
 temperament. As the story of the past, in 
 Ibsen's familiar method, is slowly unravelled we 
 see the hopeless position in which Rebekka found 
 herself when she entered Rosmersholm. Here 
 was Beata, a Nora with none of Nora's gaiety 
 or hopefulness, Beata chilled by the atmosphere 
 of Rosmersholm, nervously careful of her hus- 
 band's needs, deprecatingly desirous that he 
 should be happy. Rebekka, vigorous, modern, 
 full of ideas, is pitched into the household. She 
 sees what capacities for work, for strength, for 
 nobleness there are in Rosmer ; she does not see 
 how much he is the creature of his past and his 
 
 140 
 
ROSMERSHOLM 
 
 surroundings ; she does not remember that if she 
 can mould Rosmer so easily, therefore he is not a 
 man who possesses the strength needed in a crisis. 
 Then to her passion for the cause of emancipa- 
 tion is suddenly added " a wild, uncontrollable 
 passion " for Rosmer ; and this sweeps Beata into 
 the mill-race. Then, when the wife is dead, 
 then when her goal lies straight before her, up 
 rise the mists of Rosmer's past, all the clouds 
 of Rosmersholm, and blot her goal from view. 
 Her strength is sapped ; she no longer has her 
 old desires, nor even the desire for them ; and 
 in time she is a slave of the Rosmer view of life 
 " which ennobles, but kills happiness." 
 
 It is really, this story of Rebekka's conquest, 
 the story of one who has under-calculated the 
 powers against her. Rebekka had not reckoned 
 with that quality in her enemy which would ap- 
 peal to her own character. She had broken free ; 
 she hesitated not to lie, she did not shrink from 
 murder : but she forgot that when the gods give 
 freedom they give also, invariably, the capacity 
 to bind oneself again, either to good or to evil. 
 It is more dangerous to one's pleasure in life to 
 be free than to be contracted, for it is only the 
 free who can contract themselves. And Rebekka 
 does contract herself. Never before, perhaps, 
 had the Rosmer view of life done any good to 
 any human being ; but to this woman, with her 
 
 141 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 evil past, even the cold atmosphere of Rosmers- 
 holm brings peace, and quiet, and tranquillity. 
 But she has given to Rosmer the dangerous gift 
 of freedom, and he chooses ; chooses vaguely now 
 one course, now another, and, finally, in a sort of 
 crazy futility, chooses for Rebekka the same fate 
 as Rebekka had chosen for Beata. " If you really 
 love me, go and do what Beata does " ; and when 
 Rebekka is willing, Rosmer goes with her — and 
 the dead wife takes both. 
 
 For me, as I say, Rebekka saves the play. 
 Rosmer is so repulsively will-less that I feel it 
 a real blot on the drama that Ibsen should 
 expect one to believe that a woman like 
 Rebekka would have stayed at Rosmersholm 
 . for a day ; yet here Ibsen is certainly in accord 
 with life, which is perpetually outraging the 
 probabilities in affairs between men and women. 
 It shows too how closely Ibsen has studied his 
 characters that he made Rosmer a traditional 
 conservative : for it is astonishing how often 
 capable women will spend their time over 
 attempting to convert some hopeless bigot, if 
 his opinions are sufficiently obscurantist. Ibsen 
 soon brings Rebekka sharply up against the 
 human element in Rosmer and Rosmersholm, 
 and she recognizes it, submits and succumbs. 
 
 I did an injustice to Ulric Brendel when I 
 stated that Rebekka alone saved Rosmersholm 
 
 142 
 
ROSMERSHOLM 
 
 from being the most depressing of the later 
 plays. The incomparable figure of this Bohe- 
 mian, with his large-handed, genial outlook, so 
 far apart from Rebekka's tense vigour or 
 Mortensgard's ink-stained policy, breaks into 
 the play like a visitor from Ibsen's heroic 
 dramas. Ulric is Viking; glad, triumphant, a 
 kind of masculine Hilda Wangel, with less of 
 that fascinating creature's passion for disturbing 
 her friends. His entrances are managed with 
 astonishing skill; and the whole character, so 
 essential to the play and yet so apparently 
 casual, shows how Ibsen's stagecraft improved 
 with each drama that he wrote. 
 
 While I think the play would have gained 
 had Rosmer been made a person of greater 
 strength of character, it is difficult to give too 
 much praise to KroU. Strong, rough, quick- 
 spoken, far too apt to fling mud, yet a man 
 for whom it is possible to feel a respect that one 
 can never feel for Manders, or the unutterable 
 Roreund. It is unfortunate that Ibsen should 
 have made his behaviour to Rebekka actively 
 insolent ; but this probably is due to the pro- 
 vincialism of his models. KroU behaves exactly 
 in the way, which by literary tradition belongs 
 to merchants and self-made men ; he does not 
 behave Uke a gentleman. But for aU that we 
 feel that he is honest and straightforward and, 
 
 143 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 for mere force of character, worth five of his 
 emancipated brother-in-law. 
 
 The Lady from the Sea is the first of Ibsen's 
 prose plays in which the symbolism of the play 
 is predominant. In The Wild Duck the sym- 
 bolism is subordinate to an idea which, though 
 in essence metaphysical, is plain and simple 
 enough : in The Lady from the Sea it is the idea 
 which is symbolic. It is as though Ibsen felt 
 that he had treated the sexual relationship often 
 enough and freely enough on its domestic, on 
 its moral, and on its social side ; that he re- 
 membered his old days when, though these 
 aspects had never been forgotten, the other 
 aspect, the greater and more permanent, was so 
 big that it seemed all to him — the purely mys- 
 tical and personal aspect which is what a young 
 man and a poet means by Love. So in The 
 Lady from the Sea he gives us not a different 
 problem, but the problem treated from so 
 different an angle that critics hardly recognized 
 it as the same. EUida, the wayward, singularly 
 lovable heroine of the play, cannot conceive 
 of personal relationship except as something 
 mystical, mysterious and compelUng ; some- 
 thing whose very essence it is that it cannot be 
 expressed in any language but the language 
 of symbol and mystery, the language of the sea. 
 Any analysis of the play, with its deUcate 
 
 144 
 
THE LADY FROM THE SEA 
 
 management of the inter-relationships between 
 EUida and the Stranger and Wangel, is im- 
 possible to make without destroying the atmo- 
 sphere of fancy and imagination that surrounds 
 the characters. It is not only that Ibsen 
 manages to suggest, without any crudity, the 
 entire naturalness of EUida's passion for the 
 Stranger, and the reality of his symboUc con- 
 nection with the open sea for which she pines ; 
 but also, with great subtlety, he makes Wangel 
 not so much represent the " land- view " of life 
 as the " tame-sea " view. It is odd indeed how 
 here again, in quite another realm, we have 
 Ibsen preoccupied with the quarrel between the 
 Left and the Extreme Left. Wangel is, indeed, 
 far the best of Ibsen's husbands. He is the 
 only man of whom we feel that he not only has 
 moments when, if pushed, he might do the 
 right thing; but we are certain that funda- 
 mentally the man is sound, far sounder than the 
 grey Stranger after whom EUida yearns. It is 
 this which renders the "happy ending" of the 
 drama perfectly natural ; it is gained by 
 Wangel's turning the enemy's flank. He does 
 not oppose the Stranger and all for which the 
 Stranger stands by mere sound sense and appeal 
 to duty, nor even by mere affection; in a 
 moment of insight he sees that what EUida 
 wants is the feeling of freedom, that what the 
 K X45 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 sea means to her is the soul and its inexorable 
 claims, and in giving her the freedom of choice 
 he assures her happiness. It is not, of course, 
 that he could have anticipated the result of his 
 decision. When he says, " Now you can choose 
 your own path in full, full freedom" he be- 
 lieves that her path will take her away out of 
 his garden into the dark with the Stranger. 
 His bold step is not that of a man planning any 
 future ; it is that of Ibsen's ideal man, fearless 
 of consequences, certain of his love, acting out 
 of the agony of his heart. So, for Wangel, 
 comes his happiness, late but certain. 
 
 The symbolic element is, then, quite in the 
 ascendant in this play ; but there are, of course, 
 though subordinated, other qualities which recall 
 earlier work of the poet's. Most noticeable is 
 the recurrence, here, of Ibsen's favourite thesis 
 of salvation by love. It is true that this motive 
 recurs in Rosmersholm also. In that play 
 Rebekka redeems herself by love ; and could 
 have saved Rosmer, had not the past and the 
 image of Beata been too much for her and for 
 him. But in The Lady from the Sea the whole 
 crisis of the play turns on this old theme as 
 surely as it does in Peer Gynt. The great differ- 
 ence here is that for once it is the man who 
 is the dominant and invigorating personality. 
 EUida is full of charm, full of nameless ecstasy 
 
 146 
 
THE LADY FROM THE SEA 
 
 and a certain dignity of soul that makes her 
 prominent among Ibsen's heroines ; but she has 
 not attained the intellectual and spiritual stature 
 that Wangel hides under his rather common- 
 place exterior. It is Wangel whose love for 
 EHida — he married to have a mother for his 
 children, she to gain some position in life — 
 grows and grows until it becomes that trans- 
 forming thing which, for Ibsen, is the greatest 
 motive power in human life. It, and it alone — 
 that is essential — enables Wangel to make the 
 great renunciation, and so to give ElUda, though 
 unconscious of it, the dynamic power of another's 
 personal affection ; a power that in Ibsen's as in 
 Plato's philosophy is the surest guide to truth. 
 Indeed at this stage of his career, and until the 
 end, I am not sure that Ibsen had not become 
 convinced that Love was the only guide to 
 Truth. At any rate it is worth noticing that 
 Rosmer and Rebekka end in the mill-race 
 simply because Rosmer doubts Rebekka's love, 
 and she, though her love is enough for herself, 
 has not the power to flood his soul too : she has 
 only just saved her own. And in Hedda Gabler 
 the complete absence of real love, of any genuine 
 personal relationship at all between the main 
 characters of the play, give it a gloomy atmo- 
 sphere of sordid falsehood that is unexampled in 
 Ibsen's work. 
 
 147 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Sure, however, as Ibsen was of the power of 
 Love, when based on freedom and living on 
 truth, he was still as assured as ever of the com- 
 plete disaster and disillusionment that awaifeS 
 those who parody love. EUida and Wangel 
 escape just in time; but while they are achieving 
 their escape his daughter BoUetta and Arnholm 
 are also "contracting an alliance" from which 
 the true spirit of marriage is entirely absent. To 
 say of this, however, as Dr. Brandes does, that 
 " it is to look along an endless vista of human 
 disappointments" is to interpret not the play but 
 the critic's view of it. It would be just as legiti- 
 mate to say that, as EUida and Wangel do arrive 
 at happiness and truth, so Ibsen intends us to 
 think that BoUetta and Arnholm may: this I 
 believe to be as faulty as Dr. Brandes' deduc- 
 tion. Few, if any, critics have paid sufficient 
 attention to Ibsen's old cry, " I put that in out 
 of caprice " ; and to the testimony of men who 
 knew him in his prime that he had " a bit of the 
 devil in him." I am sure that it was just the 
 cynic in him which dictated aU the BoUetta in- 
 terest ; a recrudescence of his anger at the 
 general stupidity and falseness and hypocrisy 
 of the world. "Yes, EUida and Wangel may 
 attain perfection — but, look at BoUetta!" 
 
 So far as the concentration of interest is con- 
 cerned I agree with Mr. Archer that The Lady 
 
 148 
 
The Lady ^^rom the sea 
 
 from the Sea is not dramatically so elFective as 
 Rosmersholm or Hedda Gabler; but the apparent 
 difFuseness of interest is not greater than that in 
 The Wild Duck, where we have the sub-plot of 
 old Werle intertwined with the main story. And 
 in some ways the sub-plot of Bolletta is drama- 
 tically as necessary to the play, and psychologi- 
 cally it is far more important, than the second 
 matrimonial adventure of Werle is to the fate of 
 his son on his mission of interference. The in- 
 terest of Hilda and Lyngstrand does however 
 strike a false note, and it alone, to my mind, is 
 responsible for the impression of lessened 
 strength that so many feel after reading The 
 Lady from the Sea. All we need of Hilda is 
 that she should serve to demonstrate how deep 
 has been EUida's severance from the real life at 
 Wangel's house ; how absolutely her soul and 
 nature have been anywhere save in the land- 
 locked town. The introduction of the girlish 
 " affair " with Lyngstrand is the more discon- 
 certing because it is treated with all Ibsen's skill 
 of presentation. I fancy he introduced it at 
 first because he thought Lyngstrand was neces- 
 sary to show Hilda's character; once there he 
 allowed the situation to get command of him — I 
 can remember no other play since A Doll's 
 House where he does — and gave it a prominence 
 that upsets the balance of the drama. 
 
 149 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 The real importance of The Lady from the 
 Sea has been rather overlooked partly because so 
 many people had always been blind to Ibsen's 
 most important conviction, partly because he 
 had latterly been so preoccupied with social and 
 polemical problems that a play containing 
 purely personal conflicts was in advance of its 
 possible critics. He himself attached consider- 
 able importance to it, and felt that it was a 
 work likely to be misinterpreted by the many. 
 Although other plays may contain more of 
 Ibsen's opinions. The Lady from the 8ea en- 
 shrines more of the dramatist himself, of the 
 real man, the true man ; it shows that, while all 
 those years he has wandered far, and fought 
 strange fights and loved strange loves, his real 
 self has been here, with Solveig and all that 
 Solveig stood for, but which he could not when 
 he wrote Peer Gynt then so perfectly express. 
 
 Hedda Gabler is, contrary to Ibsen's expressed 
 theories, obviously written from observation 
 rather than from experience. Perhaps he felt 
 that he had put rather too much of his spiritual 
 experience into The Lady from the Sea, and so 
 in succession to it he produced a play that, of all 
 his dramas, leaves one impressed with the feeling 
 that one is present at a demonstration. There 
 is a very real note of hardness — relieved it is 
 true, for Ibsen could never kill the poet in him- 
 
 150 
 
HEDDA GABLER 
 
 self, by Thea Elvsted — in this terrible play of 
 modern paganism. In more senses than one 
 this play, Ibsen's most objective drama, is con- 
 nected with that old effort of his into which he 
 put so much of his own spiritual life, Julian the 
 Emperor, the man with a sickly conscience and 
 a Christian heart, who hankered after a paganism 
 that he had not strength to understand^rjp_ 
 use r Hedda is the spirit of paganism. "'Without ' 
 ideals, without interests, without any desires, 
 either physical or mental, strong enough to sap 
 her selfishness, she goes through the play in 
 which none of the people have real splendour of 
 character except Thea, and makes any one of 
 them seem human and lovable by comparison// 
 Grant Allen's judgment I have quoted. It is, ' 
 though exaggerated, a true one.' Hedda is like 
 the blasd girl of a dinner-party. But her real 
 significance is that she has nothing but the 
 " dinner-party " view of life, the " dinner-party " 
 attitude to love, people, all kinds of interests 
 during all the hours of all the days of her life. 
 After all the girl at a London dinner-party has 
 another self in other surroundings : Hedda has 
 not. ' She has nothing but the restless curiosity 
 of a mind too idle to discover things for itself, 
 and too acute to rest contented with ignorance. ' 
 She has the nature of a woman whose physical 
 elements are large ; but they are checked in her 
 
 151 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 by a conventional egotism more horrible than 
 Eilert's reckless abandon. She has, or has had, 
 faint stirrings of a capacity for emotional and 
 sentimental comradeship, but these she has 
 allowed to be killed by her incurable passion for 
 self-interest. Selfishness is the only thing that 
 moves her, except a curious trait of cowardice 
 that will not allow her to risk "scandal." 
 Appearances are all in all to her. She can see 
 nothing in Tesman, an honest, laborious student, 
 but a fool with a hobby ; she can see nothing in 
 Aunt Julia but a tiresome spinster with hideous 
 taste in clothes and demoded ideas about morals; 
 she can see nothing in Thea but a woman who, 
 through luck, has done what she has not dared 
 to do. Brack is for her simply a convenience, a 
 kind of chair-leg for this civiUzed cat to sharpen 
 her claws on, and occasionally rub her back 
 against ; and in truth perhaps that is all Brack is 
 fit for. In Eilert Lovborg she sees nothing but 
 a gay young dog, whose free stories of life about 
 town relieved the dullness of her girl's life; 
 when she began to find something else in 
 Lovborg out he had to go. Hedda Gabler is 
 the typical tired product of nineteenth-century 
 civilization : not even a splendid animal, for she 
 has not got an animal's lack of self-conscious- 
 ness. Yet when Hedda shoots herself, one does 
 not feel, as might be expected, " That's a good 
 
 152 
 
HEDDA GABLER 
 
 job." Ibsen was far too great a master to present 
 any woman as entirely worthless : after all we have 
 lived through those four acts with Hedda, and 
 we are no\more capable of rejoicing at her death. ^ 
 That is the abiding difference, never so clear 
 as here where he most nearly approaches their 
 methods, between Ibsen's naturalism and the 
 naturalism of lesser men. For instance, if Mr. j 
 Arnold Bennets had written the play — one of \ 
 the sisters in The Old Wives' Tale is of Hedda , 
 Gabler's breed — we should not have felt any '■ 
 emotion at the protagonist's fate. These lesser 
 men, who try to paint a purely objective picture 
 of life, come dangerously near the doing of it ; 
 they remove, that is, all emotional, intellectual 
 and spiritual interest from their characters ; and a 
 realistic puppet is not half so real a figure in art 
 as a fantastic, a grotesque or even a purely con- 
 ventional puppet. ' Ibsen has not pictured Hedda, ^ 
 he has created her. I do not know how else to 
 put it, how else to explain the fact that the death 
 of this woman, who has not said a kind thing, 
 done a decent action or shown any qualities save 
 malignity, selfishness and stupidity, leaves the 
 reader with a sense of real and irreparable loss. 
 It is Ibsen's keen sense of the abiding value 
 of good human stuff ; his knowledge that 
 Hedda must have had capacities for fineness 
 in her, which, in a way that is magical, get 
 
 153 
 
H:ENRIK IBSEN 
 
 through the printed text of the book and con- 
 tradict the mere facts of Hedda's life, give the 
 lie to the lowness of her actions and the caddish- 
 ness of her words./' 
 
 Thus Ibsen's one excursion into the "litera- 
 ture of observation" remains, owing to his 
 vitalising power, a technical success as great as 
 any he had achieved. While Hedda is simply 
 observed, however, the other characters in the 
 play belong essentially to Ibsen's own world of 
 experience which we get to know from his 
 character world. But Tesman's stupidity and 
 Lovborg's genius — as Mr. Archer says, "genius " 
 is an invention of the critics — have been 
 exaggerated. Tesman is no doubt a tiresome 
 bore, like most scholars of one subject, but has 
 a real student's temperament ; he has gained 
 honours in his subject, he is keen and hard- 
 working and plodding, all things which are very 
 good and necessary, and which only a fool pro- 
 fesses to despise. That he was not the husband 
 for Hedda is obvious ; and no one would have 
 selected him for her. But that was her doing, 
 and no one can blame Tesman because Hedda 
 chose him to make a fool and a husband of. 
 Dr. Brandes indulges in a great deal of very 
 captious criticism about the relation between 
 Lovborg and Tesman. There is nothing in the 
 least unlikely in a man like Lovborg, with a bad 
 
 154 
 
HEDDA GABLER 
 
 University reputation, coming to Tesman, his 
 one respectable and academic friend, in order to 
 see what impression his masterpiece will make 
 on the academic mind. Lovborg is not repre- 
 sented as despising Tesman's abilities, only as 
 being impatient of the man, and regarding him 
 as a shockingly bad husband for Hedda. It is 
 "Copenhagenism" again that makes Dr. Brandes 
 complain of Lovborg's dipsomania, which is not 
 only necessary for the action of the play, but 
 also for the development of Hedda's and Thea's 
 characters. 
 
 Thea in some ways marks a return to those 
 earlier women of Ibsen's, such as Lona or 
 Martha, who find self-expression in service and 
 self-sacrifice. Yet it is made plain enough that 
 she can only give the service because there is a 
 real Thea to do something. Lovborg, it is true, 
 calls her " silly," but this is simply said when he 
 is talking to Hedda, on his old plane of intimacy, 
 about "life." It is evident that "life," in 
 Hedda's sense, would have no attractions for 
 Thea ; Lovborg is just being " masculine " with 
 a woman whose idea of masculinity is fairly 
 sordid vice. It is here, I think, that we may 
 find the general idea which Mr. Archer says 
 it is impossible to extract from Hedda Gabler. 
 Hedda, if she has one evil trait more strongly 
 than another, has this — the idea that beauty 
 
 155 
 
HENRIK: iBSEK 
 
 is to be found in excess. She herself is too 
 cowardly to indulge in any kind of excess ; but 
 she does cling desperately to the idea that 
 it is in this direction that real freedom and 
 perfection lie. The same theme is testified by 
 her desire to see Lovborg drunk again ; there 
 will beauty be found and not in all this gloomy 
 asceticism. Now Ibsen himself had been a little 
 tainted with this idea. He had not, in his early 
 days, learnt to distinguish between violence and 
 strength ; his admiration of the Viking and 
 Berserk was due to this tendency, and when he 
 began on the theme of Julian I think he may 
 have hoped to find in him an exponent of the 
 real Dionysiac joy of life. In the writing of 
 Julian, partly from his reading, partly from the 
 way the character grew while he wrote the 
 drama, he found out that Julian's paganism was 
 as sickly as the worst side of his opponents' 
 Christianity. He put the theme aside for 
 years ; and then, possibly quite unconsciously, 
 he gave this pagan figure who, but for the 
 social cowardice that is the gift of the time and 
 age, can stand with those sinister, conscienceless 
 creatures of the Jacobean drama. 
 
 156 
 
VIII 
 
 THE MASTER-BUILDER: LITTLE 
 
 EYOLF: JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN: 
 
 WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN 
 
 Nor can I help seeing conventions where others maintain there are 
 enduring laws. 1864. These fellows had the courage to commit a folly 
 oecasionally. 1864. The lie involved in keeping silence is as much a lie 
 as is a positive assertion. 1867. There is something better worth having 
 than a clever head, that is a whole soul. 1865. 
 
 These last four plays of Ibsen's are all very 
 closely linked together. He himself said that 
 the series which closed with the Epilogue ( WTien 
 We Dead Awaken) began with The Master- 
 Builder. All that Ibsen meant by this may 
 not be discoverable; but I am sure that one 
 thing, very prominent in each of the four, which 
 made him think of the plays as a united series, 
 is the conflict between youth and age. It is 1 
 most conspicuous in The Master-Builder ; most 
 prominent in the elfish figure who comes knock- 
 ing at Solness' door. In Little Eyolf, the boy 
 who has been for his father only a kind of 
 educational opportunity, and for his mother 
 only a regrettable interruption to her passion 
 for her husband, by his death renders the 
 younger generation felt in the house of Allmers. 
 In John Gabriel Borkman the conflict between 
 
 157 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 youth and age, between Erhart and the three 
 who ask for his aid, ends in a violent cleavage : 
 youth goes Ughtly to rather calculated pleasures, 
 and age can only droop down to death and dis- 
 appointment. In When We Dead Awaken the 
 conflict is presented in Ibsen's familiar material, 
 an unsuitable marriage ; and Maia's clamour for 
 youth and its pleasures and its rights breaks 
 against Rubek's absorption in his work and its 
 interests. 
 
 We may then say definitely that, besides his 
 
 other problems, Ibsen in these years was taking 
 
 deeply to heart the arrival of youth. No doubt 
 
 much of his feeling was natural to so vigorous 
 
 and alert a personality, as he felt that the age 
 
 was, in its young people, occupied with other 
 
 interests than his ; that it regarded many of his 
 
 , questions as settled, and many of his puzzles as 
 
 long ago read. And it is of peculiar interest 
 
 how in these plays his attitude to youth changes. 
 
 ' In The Master- Builder Hilda represents some- 
 
 thing definitely finer than Solness, and freer 
 
 than Aline's ideals. The playwright seems to 
 
 i rejoice in the young advancing personality that 
 
 I swings into the middle of the melancholy and 
 
 (suspicion and distrust and ugly rivalry of 
 
 Solness' house. He almost cheers on Hilda as, 
 
 j with lure and taunt and appeal, she works on 
 
 Solness' feelings, changes his mind for him, 
 
 158 
 
THE MASTER-BUILDER 
 
 makes him see, for a moment, the existence o^ 
 his wife, and finally drives him up and up, only 
 to die when his great work is accomplished.! 
 The note in Little Eyolf is far calmer and 
 softer. Here again Eyolf is the true figure in 
 the play. It is he who brings AUmers out of 
 his ethical slush, and Rita out of her physical 
 narrowness ; but it is he, youth, that dies : it is 
 only by dying he is triumphant. Youth is still 
 victorious in Eyolf, as in Hilda, but the victory 
 is gained at the cost of its own complete 
 absorption. 
 
 In John Gabriel Borkman the conflict is more 
 commonplace; indeed, though it is prominent, 
 I cannot feel that Erhart's story is the first 
 thing in the drama. The main interest is in 
 Borkman and Ella. But here Ibsen says : 
 "After all this conflict need not mean much: 
 what is there to choose between youth and age ? 
 Youth only makes a different kind of mistake. 
 There is no victory; there are no victories in 
 life at all ; at least not in lives like these. Age 
 fails, and youth fails too." But in When We 
 Dead Awaken we have a very different word. 
 Here, to begin with, youth in the person of 
 Maia confronts age in the person of one who is 
 more vital than she. Maia is a kind of feminine 
 Erhart, with none of Erhart's weak charm ; she 
 is hard and pretty, with a vulgar little soul. 
 
 159 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Still she is young, and Rubek feels his dis- 
 advantages. But in the end, when Maia — with 
 Rubek's cynical permission ; he is not going to 
 fight in so ridiculous a battle — has gone off on 
 her voyage of youth, physical, emotional youth, 
 it is left to the old sculptor, through his meet- 
 ing with Irene, to attain a youth of spirit and 
 heart from which Maia, in her shrivelled worldly 
 wisdom, is poles away. So Ibsen, in this last 
 play, regains his hold over himself. He sees, as 
 it were, that he has almost been in danger of 
 getting obsessed with this knocking at the door. 
 He wiped his mind clean from all his fancies 
 about these vigorous, high-spirited men and 
 maidens who clamoured for their castles. If it 
 came to youth, he asked himself, what was youth, 
 after all, but a spirit, and was not that his as much 
 as anyone else's ; did it not always remain for the 
 man and woman who cared to claim it ? 
 
 The Master-Builder has produced more con- 
 troversy than any of Ibsen's plays ; and it still 
 divides the camp of his professed followers. 
 I cannot see how anyone can think it an un- 
 likely play for the author of The Wild Duck 
 and The Lady frovi the Sea to have written. 
 Its symbolism is doubtless more elaborate than 
 that of either of the other plays, and it is quite 
 free from those side-interests which encourage 
 distraction in The Lady from the Sea. But the 
 
 160 
 
THE MASTER-BUILDER 
 
 treatment, the retrospective method to which 
 Ibsen has accustomed us, is the same as before ; 
 for I cannot think that the fact that it is mainly 
 applied to Solness' psychological development 
 is a very violent departure from the dramatist's 
 method. After all in Bosmersholm the retrospec- 
 tion is concerned with Rosmer's and Rebekka's 
 mental development far more than with any 
 actual occurrences, such as Beata's death. Be- 
 sides there is a good deal of actual affairs in the 
 retrospect of The Master- Builder, and if these 
 are, as Mr. Archer says, " few and simple," I do 
 not find them much simpler than those in 
 Rosmersholm. In Bosmersholm we only listen 
 to the past of Beata, Rebekka and Rosmer — a 
 past that is all one : but in The Master-Builder 
 not only does the retrospect embrace the past of 
 Hilda and Solness, brief, it is true, and with 
 simple incidents, but also the past of Aline 
 Solness and her husband. The greater "sim- 
 plicity " of the material in The Master-Builder 
 is due to the fact that the whole play is based 
 on a conception of simple things which pulls 
 them up into a reality where bigger, more 
 difficult things seem as simple as a girl's whims 
 or a woman moaning for her dolls. In the 
 atmosphere, that wonderful breathless mountain- 
 top atmosphere, that pervades the play from the 
 minute Hilda enters, a word, a touch, a glance 
 L 161 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 in that magical past at Lysanger, a whisper, 
 a sob, mean as much as murder and disaster 
 and dishonour did at Rosmersholm. To say 
 that in The Master-Builder "the retrospect is 
 purely psychological " seems to me to lay undue 
 emphasis on Solness ; just as I cannot accept 
 Mr. Archer's view that " the motive of the play 
 is the soul-history of Halvard Solness." There 
 are moments when I feel that Solness is only 
 a fantasy of Hilda's, a figure of her triumphant 
 march to the possession of her castle ; this I 
 know is an exaggeration, but I do not think it 
 is more so than to lay the emphasis on Solness 
 alone. Really, in spite of its greater fantasy. 
 The Master-BuiMer is much more akin to 
 Ibsen's other works than we have been inclined 
 to think. A little unjustly we look at Aline 
 through Solness' eyes, and at Kaia through 
 Solness' and Aline's ; and we might end by 
 making Solness into the figure of enormous 
 force which he thinks himself to be. But the 
 true angle from which to interpret the play, 
 from which to judge the characters, is Hilda's. 
 And it is Hilda who, though she still has the 
 love of mischief that was shown in The Lady 
 from the Sea, sees the people in the house at 
 their true value. When she first comes Mrs. 
 Solness is less than nothing to her, but swiftly 
 with intercourse comes understanding ; and she 
 
 163 
 
THE MASTER BUILDER 
 
 says she will go away because " I cannot do any 
 harm to anyone whom 1 know." And with all| 
 her recklessness, her devil, her strange air oi\ 
 non-humanity, it is Hilda who is quickest at' 
 getting into right relations with things. She! 
 for years has been living with a reality, one of 
 those relations so certain and so secure that 
 they can stand the contact with facts. Solness, 
 nursing his sick conscience, uneasy, afraid of the 
 younger generation, practical yet dreaming futile 
 dreams of locking a door to which other hands 
 hold the master-key, has lost all sense of 
 real life, all feeling for real human beings. His 
 wife, drab, unattractive, melancholy, is merely 
 a sad sight to be avoided ; Kaia, who is young ' 
 without any great vitality, is just so much 
 material to feed his vanity. Hilda forces him 
 to see people. He has been living with human 
 beings as if they were furniture ; Hilda comes 
 and reminds him that the most casual relation 
 with another human being may engender a 
 wonderful and abiding reality. He, after great 
 sorrow and great disappointment, can do nothing 
 but brood and endeavour to forget ; Hilda shows 
 him that nothing can be done save by remem- 
 bering, treasuring up words that were scarcely 
 whispered, and promises that only the heart 
 knew. And when Hilda finds how much 
 Solness has been neglecting, she turns and 
 
 163 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 shows him the only path for him to get at truth. 
 He must abandon his clutch on the things of 
 • his youth, he must build castles in the air. That 
 is all she will ask from him, it is that which 
 she demands ; for only thus can he and she go 
 hand in hand and challenge the Mighty Lord. 
 
 To me the most puzzling thing in the play 
 is Hilda's actual development in the course of 
 it. That Ibsen intends Solness to be slightly 
 obsessed, if not actually deranged in mind, I am 
 sure ; but I cannot be certain how far Hilda is 
 meant to be affected by that. When she diag- 
 noses Solness' illness as a sickly conscience, does 
 she sow doubt in herself? Does she, from 
 then, feel less certain about the beauty and 
 splendour of Viking life, the thrilling joy of 
 being carried away ? Hilda is not a very young 
 girl, she is between twenty-two and twenty- 
 three ; and Ibsen is careful in stating her age. 
 It is possible that he himself is not certain 
 how her character would develop ; for instance 
 'whether the quality of pity — unconscious, even 
 when felt — is in her at all when she first arrives 
 at the house. But I believe that Ibsen did not 
 mean that the robustness of her conscience 
 really was sapped by the doubts that Solness 
 harbours ; merely that it might have exercised 
 itself rather differently from the way in which 
 she thought. There is no doubt at all that 
 
 164 
 
THE MASTER-BUILDER 
 
 while Solness' forgetfulness and flippant treat- 
 ment of her " claim " in the first act made not\ 
 the slightest difference to Hilda, her experiences I 
 with Aline make a great deal. The difficulty! 
 that the dramatist had to develop Hilda's char- 
 acter is really evaded, with great skill, by the 
 way in which the note of fantasy is forced after 
 Hilda's conversation with Aline, the conversa- 
 tion in which she gets to "know" her. And 
 the forcing of this note is made to seem per- 
 fectly natural by the increase in Solness' illness ; 
 so that at the end of the play we feel that both 
 Solness and Hilda have passed into a region 
 where we cannot apply the ordinary laws of 
 psychology without rmning the subtle mechan- 
 ism of their action, '^ilda and Solness, in that 
 last act, evolve a psychology of their own by 
 which all that happens and all that is said seems 
 perfectly right and natural ; Ibsen in evading 
 the difficulty, by sheer creative power, evades 
 criticism as well.^ 
 
 Aline Solnes^ is one of the most ungrateful 
 parts that any actress can have. Ibsen has 
 made her so unattractive that there is danger 
 of forgetting what beautiful traits he has given 
 her as well. Right at the beginning he indi- 
 cates, with ever so delicate a touch, how mucl 
 finer a nature is Aline's than her husband's 
 But all Aline's character is thwarted and twistec 
 
 165 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 through her sorrow, and her conscious sense of 
 duty. She has lived alone for years with the 
 ghosts of nine dolls, and it is no wonder that 
 her character has narrowed ; but Ibsen, except 
 perhaps in the speech about Kaia, does not 
 show her as hardened at all. She is genuinely 
 glad — as glad as she can be of anything — of 
 Hilda's influence with Solness ; and while this 
 may partly spring from her anxiety at her hus- 
 band's illness it is not entirely that. It is 
 putting a false emphasis on the play, par- 
 ticularly if we remember Ibsen's past work, if 
 we do not insist that apart from the history of 
 Solness and Hilda the dramatist wants to give 
 some attention to this blighted life, this life 
 which Solness has neglected and tried to ignore. 
 
 Little Eyolf was the first play by Ibsen that 
 I read. I remember perfectly well how I was 
 mainly impressed, after I had managed to lift 
 myself out of the strange new experience of the 
 work, by the simplicity and fascinating success 
 of the Rat- Wife, and by the extraordinarily 
 solemn progress of the action. I do not know 
 any work of Ibsen's in which the mere march 
 of events, though there is scarcely more than 
 one actual " event " in the play, is so impressive, 
 so majestic. I felt after reading it as if I had 
 watched some amazingly full and vivid life, a 
 
 166 
 
LITTLE EYOLF 
 
 life crowded with incident and excitement and 
 suspense ; and there is nothing in it, — nothing 
 except the death of a Uttle boy, and the con- 
 versations of his father and mother and aunt.' 
 In Little Eyolf the wonderful effect of irre- 
 sistible progress is heightened by the play's dis- 
 tinct supernatural side. This is the first play 
 in which Ibsen seemed to return, though with 
 altered language, to the religion of his past; 
 there is a tinge of Calvinism in the talk of 
 retribution, but it is a happier and a better 
 religion which makes the solution of the play, 
 when Rita decides on a life of service for others. 
 The simple direct theme of Little Eyolf is 
 hardly diverted by the sub-interest of Asta and 
 Borgheim ; their saga only serves for Asta's con- 
 fession to Alfred AUmers that she is no kin to 
 him. Apart from this the whole force of the 
 drama is focussed on the three who are left after 
 Eyolf 's death. Asta, though of the same nature 
 
 * There is an odd note about lAttk Eyolf in the Ibsen corre- 
 spondence (English edition, p. 443) : " In criticising Little Eyolf 
 after its performance in Paris . . . Jules Lemaitre showed that he 
 had so far misunderstood the plot as to believe that Asta Allmers 
 was Alfred's half-sister, which would have introduced the element 
 of incest into the play." Asta is so far as he knows Alfred's half- 
 sister : she is so described in the list of characters ; yet Ibsen speaks 
 of Lemaitre "acknowledging his mistake in a very frank and 
 pleasant manner." It seems almost incredible that anyone should 
 ignore the scene in which Asta tells Allmers the truth about her 
 birth ; but this is, presumably, what M. Lemaitre did. 
 
 167 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 as Ibsen's other helping women, has in her an 
 independence of character greater than usual. 
 From the first she is the most direct and real 
 person in the play : she has little patience with 
 Allmers' theories, when they threaten Eyolf's 
 health, just as she has no sympathy with Rita's 
 passions when they threaten Allmers' health. 
 Never has Ibsen done a more skilful or more 
 delicate piece of work than in his portrait of 
 Rita, the woman for whom her husband is little 
 more than an instrument of pleasure. In Rita, 
 with her insane jealousies, her shrinking from 
 motherhood, her absorption in physical things, 
 Ibsen has given us a modern woman as true as 
 Hedda. Rita has not Hedda's intellect, and so 
 she is saved from Hedda's stupidity, for Hedda's 
 stupid actions are essentially those of a clever 
 woman. Rita, indeed, is the more hopeful 
 because she is more sensual. Sins of the body 
 are less deadly to the soul than sins of the mind ; 
 in holding that Ibsen always remained an ortho- 
 dox Christian. Allmers is one of those men 
 who, on any a priori grounds, seem incredible, 
 but who are always astonishing us by existing 
 and forcing themselves on our attention. He 
 is the antithesis to Tesman, the successful 
 University man who marries out of calf-love. 
 Allmers is the solitary student, dignified, not 
 particularly cordial, but extremely agreeable to 
 
 168 
 
JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN 
 
 people he likes ; and he marries half out of mere 
 physical passion, half because his wife has " the 
 gold and the green forests." So Rita, married 
 to a husband who in his ideals is as sensual as 
 she is, has no chance of changing her character 
 until she meets with disaster. Then, acting on 
 a temperament that has always been responsive, 
 that has always, even though in a narrow range, 
 been ready to give, disaster brings salvation, 
 and Rita leads AUmers out of the gloom and 
 distress that are threatening to engulf them 
 both. It is not Ibsen's " feminism " which makes 
 Rita soften the sorrows of the two, it is his real 
 knowledge of human nature ; for he knows that 
 one who has been endowed with Rita's physical 
 temperament has far greater capacity for 
 genuine feeUng than has the more calculating 
 type of materialist such as AUmers. 
 
 John Gabriel Borkman is really Brand re- 
 written in prose. Together with When We 
 Dead Awaken it reiterates Ibsen's thesis, the 
 one most frequently insisted on in his theatre, 
 that the only unpardonable sin is the sin against ^ 
 Love. As Brand sacrificed Agnes to religion, ^~ 
 Borkman sacrificed Ella to business, and Rubek 
 sacrificed Irene to art : and Ibsen will have them 
 all condemned. I am chary of identifying a 
 dramatist with any of his characters' speeches — 
 
 169 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 subjective reconstruction of the great artist from 
 his work is a perilous game, and is too often 
 played to-day — but when we find Ibsen thus 
 returning, in his old age, to the same motive 
 that had engaged his prime, and in two suc- 
 cessive plays making his chief character a man 
 who has betrayed a woman's trust, it is legitimate 
 to believe that the subject is one that he deemed 
 of supreme importance, and that he agrees with 
 the view which the dramatic character of each 
 play invariably leaves victorious. No one in- 
 deed has doubted, so far as I know, that Ibsen 
 did intend the final cry from the thunder in 
 Brand to represent a judgment, and a right 
 judgment on the hero's life: no one has disputed, 
 except Mr. Shaw, that the ending of Peer 
 Gynt is his attempt at a solution of the problem. 
 What has been ignored so strangely is the fact 
 that in the other later plays Ibsen is concerned 
 with exactly the same problem, and insists on 
 the same solution : while even in plays whose 
 main subject is different, there are often minor 
 characters through whom Ibsen presses home 
 his conviction that Love is the only redeemer, 
 and that the only offence is the sin against 
 Love. In John Gabriel Borkman Ella Rentheim 
 states the matter plainly. The dialogue is worth 
 quoting : 
 
 170 
 
JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN 
 
 BoRKMAN. One shrinks from risking what one holds 
 dearest on such a voyage. 
 
 Ella. You had risked what was dearest to you on 
 that voyage. Your whole future life 
 
 BoRKMAN. Life is not always what one holds dearest. 
 
 Ella. Was that how you felt at that time .'' 
 
 BoRKMAN. I fancy it was. 
 
 Ella. I was the dearest thing in the world to you .'' 
 
 BoRKxMAN. I seem to remember something of the sort. 
 
 Ella. And yet years and years had passed since you 
 had deserted me — and married — married another ! 
 
 BoRKMAN. Deserted you, you say.!* You must know 
 very well that it was higher motives — well then, other 
 motives that compelled me. Without his support I 
 couldn't have done anything. 
 
 Ella. So you deserted me from — higher motives. 
 
 BoRKMAN. I could uot get on without his help. And 
 he made you the price of helping me. 
 
 Ella. And you paid the price. Paid it in full — 
 without haggling. 
 
 BoRKMAN. I had no choice. I had to conquer or fall. 
 
 Ella. Can what you tell me be true.'' that I was 
 then the dearest thing in the world to you ? 
 
 BoRKMAN. Both then and long afterwards — long, long 
 after. 
 
 171 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Ella, But you bartered me away none the less; 
 drove a bargain with another man for your love. Sold 
 my love for a — for a directorship. 
 
 BoRKMAN. I was driven by inexorable necessity, Ella. 
 
 Ella. Criminal ! 
 
 BoRKMAN. I have heard that word before. 
 
 Ella. Oh, do not imagine I'm thinking of anything 
 you may have done against the law of the land. The 
 use you made of all those vouchers and securities or 
 whatever you call them — do you think I care a straw 
 about that.? If I could have stood at your side when 
 the crash came 
 
 BoRKMAN. What then, Ella ? 
 
 Ella. Trust me, I should have borne it all so gladly 
 along with you. The shame, the ruin — I would have 
 helped you to bear it all — all ! 
 
 BoRKMAN. Would you have had the will — the 
 strength ? 
 
 Ella. Both the will and the strength. For then I 
 did not know of your great, your terrible crime. 
 
 BoRKMAN. What crime ? What are you speaking of.? 
 
 Ella. I am speaking of that crime for which there is 
 no forgiveness. 
 
 BoRKMAN. You must be out of your mind. 
 
 Ella. You are a murderer. You have committed the 
 one mortal sin. 
 
 172 
 
JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN 
 
 BoHKMAN. You are raving, Ella. 
 
 Ella. You have killed the love-life in me. Do you 
 understand what that means.' The Bible speaks of a 
 mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have 
 never understood what it could be ; but now I understand. 
 The great, the unpardonable sin is to murder the love- 
 life in a human soul. 
 
 The case is put at its extremest, of course ; 
 but I have little doubt that it was Ibsen's con- 
 viction, that he agreed with Ella. That his 
 mind at this period has gone back a good deal to 
 his youth is shown, too, by his making Borkman 
 a miner's son, indeed the very boy whose passion 
 about the singing ore he had made into a poem. 
 I find this motive, the guilt of the man who 
 rejects love and kills the love-life, almost over- 
 comes the other motive in John Gabriel Bark- 
 Tnan. Powerful as the play is, Gunhild is so 
 stern and repellent a figure that it is rather 
 difficult to sympathize with her tragedy; and 
 Erhart arouses no feelings except annoyance, 
 mingled with an admission that his Ufe must 
 have been rather terrible before the arrival of 
 Mrs. Wilton. That charming adventuress is 
 one of Ibsen's liveliest creations. She is barely 
 on the stage ten minutes, and has very few 
 words to speak, yet her character, her past, her 
 late husband, her dressmaker's bill, her fortune, 
 
 173 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 her probable burial-ground are all fairly easily 
 guessed. In painting her Ibsen employs, on 
 a very small scale, the methods he had found 
 so successful in painting Hedda. Mrs. Wilton 
 is just observed, and the result, again, makes any 
 of our modern realists seem amateurs both at 
 characterization and at draughtsmanship. 
 
 Ella Rentheim, although in many ways she 
 resembles other of Ibsen's " gentle " women, 
 has, apart from her very distinct personality, 
 a quality that marks her off. She has grown 
 old. This is not altogether a disadvantage — 
 I can fancy Ibsen marking this down to age 
 when he was calculating what chances it had 
 against youth — for Ella Rentheim, though still 
 sweet and gentle, has learned firmness and per- 
 haps a greater wisdom. She no longer fears 
 Gunhild and she understands her better, and it 
 is through this understanding that she can in the 
 end do something to soften her sister's character ; 
 something to alleviate the tragedy that has crept 
 into the house in the space of a few hours. 
 
 Foldal, the " Napoleonic " clerk, Foldal, who 
 helps the great John Gabriel to go on living and 
 hoping in return for John Gabriel's behef in his 
 poetic impulse and power, belief in his great 
 tragedy, is one of Ibsen's truest minor charac- 
 ters. His return, when he has had his foot run 
 over by the sled in which his daughter is going 
 
 174 
 
WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN 
 
 away with Erhart and Mrs, Wilton, is one of 
 the most pathetic scenes in drama ; its astonish- 
 ing mixture of sweetness and cynicism is a feat 
 that no other than Ibsen could accomplish with 
 the same rigid economy of line and triumphant 
 fullness of effect. 
 
 The chief impression of the play is that of 
 " getting old." The burden of years, years wasted 
 in hope, years wasted in longing, years wasted 
 in yearning, sounds through the drama. Over 
 every scene hangs the chill, deadly cloud that 
 killed John Gabriel, and turned his wife and 
 her sister into shadows. 
 
 If When We Dead Awaken, viewed techni- 
 cally, is one of the least successful of Ibsen's 
 plays, it is also one that cannot be ignored if 
 we would know with what message he wished 
 his name to be associated. Irene has a good 
 deal of Hilda Wangel in her, only with her 
 irresponsibility has passed into actual madness. 
 She has Hilda's way of taking not what a man 
 says, but what he means, and of knowing what 
 he means even in spite of himself. Rubek has 
 used her, years before they meet in the play, as 
 a model for a great statue of the Resurrection. 
 She served him " in frank utter nakedness," and 
 he ignored the woman in his passion for work ; 
 for him it was always the "work of art first," 
 
 175 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 then the human being. Yet Rubek's sin lay 
 not in his being artist first, but in using his art 
 to kill his humanity. For he really loved Irene ; 
 he knew that her real gift to him was her 
 " young living soul." She, like Hilda, " takes 
 things to heart," and what drove her from Rubek 
 was his sentence, so appalling to her in its self- 
 control, "This has been a priceless episode 
 for me." 
 
 It is in that sentence we have the key to the 
 play. Ibsen has gradually worked his way to 
 the position that no man has a right to treat 
 love as an " episode." For most men it is. The 
 ordinary man has his career, his life-work, his 
 art — is Brand, or Borkman, or Rubek — and ex- 
 pects woman to sacrifice herself to him ; expects 
 her consciously and deliberately to take the 
 second place. This is what is wrong with the 
 world, says Ibsen ; man ^nust jta ke love aj 
 seriously_ag^ woman does. It must be all or 
 nothing to him. And it will not mean the 
 abandonment of work; men will not have to 
 forsake their art or their business, for true love 
 implies comradeship, and men and women, in 
 future, are to work together. 
 
 Where When We Dead Awaken shows some 
 weakening of power is in the characterization. 
 Although his theme is still sound and certain, 
 Ibsen gives it into the keeping of a somewhat 
 
 176 
 
WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN 
 
 unconvincing set of characters. Rubek himself, 
 the sculptor, in much of whose past one feels 
 the touch of autobiography, notably in his de- 
 scription of the impossible statue, is the best 
 seen and best realized character. But in the 
 third act, and in part of the second, Ibsen 
 appears to lose his grip of the man. On Maia 
 and Irene his grip never closed ; both betray 
 unmistakable signs of weariness. Maia is at 
 times a perfectly shallow little worldling ; at 
 times (I suspect when Ibsen remembers that he 
 has to put blame on Rubek) she seems to have 
 a depth of character that belongs to someone 
 else, Ulfheim, the hunter, is incredible and 
 crude, and the minor figures are entirely insig- 
 nificant. Yet in spite of the weakness of the 
 play it does leave a strange impression of intense 
 reahty and truth ; an impression which at times 
 seems heightened by the almost grotesque in- 
 capacity of the characters to carry the burden 
 of the theme. The impression is of a man who 
 is so full of his message that he stutters in the 
 delivering of it ; for the first time in his life 
 Ibsen felt more than he could express. That 
 is perhaps the greatest tribute to the sincerity 
 of his idea : that Love should be always _firgt, 
 that human per s onalities were the m ost im- 
 portant thing, that, when the great artist t nes 
 to procla im again his old messag e^_the weight 
 M 177 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 breaks down even his art. In this last play 
 Ibsen shows the truth of his message not, as 
 before, by triumphant exposition, but by ex- 
 ample : " art must take second place " is what he 
 wishes us to see in the drama of Rubek, and for 
 the first time art does take second place with the 
 great dramatist, and we are left with a far keener 
 sense of Ibsen's message than of his play. 
 
 178 
 
IX 
 CONCLUSIONS 
 
 People believe that I have changed my views in the course of time. 
 This is a great mistake. Every development has, as a matter of fact, 
 been altogether consistent. I myself can follow distinctly and indicate 
 the trend of its whole course — the unity of my ideas and their gradual 
 growth. 1881. I have been more poet and less social philosopher than 
 people generally seem inclined to believe. 1898. 
 
 It is difficult for us to understand how any 
 critics were found to endanger their reputations 
 by denying that Ibsen was a master of the 
 drama and of the theatre. What disturbs the 
 younger generation is that he is, perhaps, almost 
 too skilful in his use of all the conventions and 
 artifices of the stage and of the form which his 
 genius did so much to improve. /Sometimes.N 
 even in The Master-Builder or in The Wild\ 
 Thick, we feel that Ibsen is using his astounding/ 
 technical skill to force his characters into posi- 
 tions which they would never have occupied ; 
 while in some of his earlier dramas the machin- 
 ery, beautiful and suitable as it is, may appear 
 too ready to the hand of the personages. 
 
 A certain amount of attention has been 
 directed lately to the " fourth wall." Mr. Shaw 
 introduced the problem fancifully in a jeu 
 d^esprit which he wrote for a charity ; and since 
 then persons with less humour have emphasized 
 the " fourth wall " by setting a scene in which 
 
 179 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 the fireplace is against the footUghts ; so that the 
 principal character can warm his hands at the 
 orchestra. This kind of elaborate dullness shows 
 how great is the divorce between the revival of 
 dramatic art, a desire for a more human theatre, 
 and any real grasp of general principles. There 
 is, of course, a fourth wall, but it is not between 
 the audience and the stage ; it is behind the 
 audience. We shall have no continued and 
 healthy revival of drama until we get back to 
 the Greek and Oriental illusion, simpler and 
 sincerer than ours, which renders the audience 
 part, and a necessary part, of the stage-play. 
 The idea of the theatre as being a place where 
 the audience can obtain a surreptitious peep at 
 the lives of the dramatist's characters is thor- 
 oughly unsound ; a good play is not an external 
 spectacle, it is, in an intensive form, a presenta- 
 tion of the possible experience of every member 
 of the audience. The characters in a play are 
 ourselves, and the illusion of the stage is the 
 illusion not of a window but of a mirror. I have 
 said that the audience is a necessary part of a 
 stage play; of course an audience is necessary to 
 any work of art, but it is peculiarly so to the 
 drama. A drama that cannot be acted is a 
 drama that cannot really be felt; it may be a 
 good essay, or a pretty picture, but it has missed 
 that essential quality of absorbing the self of the 
 
 180 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 audience which is the proper note of the drama. 
 Owing to the fact that part of a dramatist's 
 material — his modelling clay — is human bodies 
 and emotions and minds as actually living in 
 actual persons, the appeal of the drama must 
 always differ from that of the other arts, differ 
 in this respect, that the audience must be 
 charmed or forced or allured into a sympathy 
 that does not differ in kind from that accorded 
 to actual scenes of distress, of passion and of 
 humour. It is this, I believe, which explains the 
 puzzling predominance in England of forms of 
 drama that are mean, or foolish or ignoble or 
 merely frivolous. Owing to the old leaven of 
 Puritanism the more educated and intellectual 
 people in England lost their capacity, or their 
 desire, to see themselves in drama. An unholy 
 pride, the inevitable result of Puritanism, made 
 them feel self-conscious and stupid at the sight 
 of mummers ; they had not sufficient sense of 
 human dignity to laugh at human folly, and 
 they had not enough faith in God's mercy to 
 weep at human sin. They shut off from them- 
 selves these great opportunities for educating 
 the emotions ; and the result has been that a 
 class whose emotions are either atrophied or 
 strident has taken possession of the English 
 theatre and forced its standards on the stage. It 
 is hard to quarrel with so genial a critic as 
 
 181 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Charles Lamb ; but I believe his comments on 
 the Restoration Comedy have done more harm 
 than any other generalization about our drama. 
 It Has become almost an axiom with people who 
 know nothing of Congreve and Wycherley but 
 Lamb's essay to quote airily, " They are a world 
 of themselves almost as much as fairyland. . . . 
 They break through no laws, or conscientious 
 restraints. They know of none," and apply the 
 saying to the latest Gaiety mixture of poor taste 
 and loose morals. The argument against Lamb 
 is a fairly obvious one ; whatever his view of the 
 world of Congreve it is certain that the drama- 
 tist drew what he saw, that his plays, and those 
 of his fellow-authors, are good transcripts of a 
 very actual life. It is this which prevents me 
 from accepting the defence of a critic who was 
 possibly too gentle in character to realize how 
 beastly a world that of Grammont and his like 
 was, how tiresomely similar to ordinary unpolite 
 debauchery was the behaviour of the gallants, 
 male and female, that are now chiefly known 
 through the gaiety and wit of their dramatic 
 interpreters. To audiences sharing, however un- 
 consciously. Lamb's views of dramatic charac- 
 ters, Ibsen naturally came with the force of a 
 tremendous and unwelcome surprise. There 
 was no possibility of dismissing the characters in 
 A Doll's House as creatures of fairyland ; they 
 
 182 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 were too obviously people in the street. Even 
 though Torvald was not in your own stall, 
 could you be certain that it was not Nora seated 
 by your side ? This, then, was Ibsen's greatest 
 achievement in drama. He brought us all back 
 — though some have yet to realize it — to the 
 right view of dramatic life ; he made his audi- 
 ences part of his plays. We live in, not look at, 
 a play by Ibsen. 
 
 Ibsen, of course, secures that result very largely 
 by technical excellence. He often enough, for 
 instance, reverts to the old rules of the unities, 
 and uses them with a force and reality that 
 make us forget, however blameably, their classi- 
 cal origin. Again, the sense of actuality is en- 
 hanced greatly by Ibsen's retrospective method. 
 His amazing skill in making his characters un- 
 fold their past actions, and disclose their past 
 lives, would alone make him the supreme drama- 
 tist of the age. The variety and unequalled 
 success of his method, in this respect, has never 
 perhaps been sufficiently recognized. After A 
 Doll's House there is hardly a play in which the 
 method is not used ; and yet it is only after 
 many re-readings and comparisons that the 
 reader realizes there is a common method, so 
 different is the use made of it in Ghosts, say, 
 from that in The Master-Builder. The only 
 author since Ibsen who has at times approached 
 
 183 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 his master in use of this dramatic device is Mr. 
 Shaw : in Mrs. Warren^s Profession we have his 
 most successful instance of it. But Mr. Shaw 
 never succeeds in clothing the method with the 
 extreme naturalness which Ibsen always manages 
 to secure. We feel that Mrs. Warren's scene 
 with her daughter has been arranged to give her 
 the opportunity of explaining herself and her 
 life, and incidentally to give Mr. Shaw an occa- 
 sion for giving his views of Mrs. Warren's life. 
 In short, the preacher is greater than the artist. 
 The only play of Ibsen in which anyone might 
 suspect this fault is Ghosts, and there the situa- 
 tion is completely saved by the fact that Manders 
 is a preacher, and that his diatribe against Mrs. 
 Alving's books, which starts the great scene of 
 retrospection, belongs rightly to an occasion that 
 he would never have missed,, . Ibsen never shows 
 his greatness so plainly as in the fact that, when 
 we do suspect him of any tendency to didacti- 
 cism, our suspicions are invariably lulled by 
 his inventing a character to whom the delivery 
 of this particular message shall seem entirely 
 appropriate. 
 
 But, after all, even more helpful in conveying 
 the impression of reality is Ibsen's observance of 
 the unities. He was no pedant on this point. 
 There is no play in which we find an absolute 
 observance of the unities in the classic sense : 
 
 184 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 but he is, in his best work, as far removed from 
 the romantic licence common to the northern 
 drama as from the rigid formalism that put 
 shackles on the Latin playwright. We find, 
 indeed, in Ibsen's work all the three great forms 
 of literature, romantic, classic and modernist. 
 I have in another place ^ tried to express the 
 chief distinction between these three modes of 
 art. To the classic artist form is primary ; 
 style is apt to overweigh subject : to the romantic, 
 art knows few rules, and may break those if she 
 keeps the law of beauty : to the modernist, art 
 is too unconscious to be formulated ; he will not 
 have even the rule of non-subservience to rules 
 which is the oriflamme of the romantic revolt. 
 Now in Ibsen's historical plays his method was 
 romantic ; so also in Brand and Peer Gynt, 
 though for me their romanticism of manner is 
 so overcome by the modernism of their mood 
 that I cannot class them with anything but the 
 supreme works that top all schools, with Hamlet 
 or Vida es Sueno. In A Doll's House we have 
 a play almost entirely classical ; it is a recounting 
 in prose of a theme Euripides would have re- 
 joiced in, while in Ghosts theme, mode and style 
 are all Greek in their severity, their humanity 
 and their awe. It is indeed to Greek drama, 
 and not to French or to English, that we must 
 
 ' Samuel Rogers and his Circle, pp. 5-7. 
 
 185 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 go to find Ibsen's true parallels : he is Hellene in 
 his courageous choice of subjects, and Hellene 
 in his stern, untinselled manner of deaUng with 
 them. He has neither the lubricity that we 
 suspect in Dumas, nor the conscious righteous- 
 ness that we discover in Brieux : when he writes 
 plainly about disagreeable things he wants 
 neither to shock the public nor to coerce the 
 censor; he wants to move old boundary-posts. 
 It may be that his connection with small nation- 
 alities helped the Athenian colour of Ibsen's 
 mind. To pass from the intense life of Norway 
 and Denmark to the intenser life of Papal 
 Rome ; thence to small capitals of small and 
 artistic peoples, such as the Saxons and the 
 Bavarians, must have done much to encourage 
 Ibsen in his dislike of the growth of huge 
 empires and world-wide powers. Just as an 
 Athenian valued not size nor success, but a life 
 shared in keen rivalry by a handful of friends 
 and foes ; so Ibsen regretted the fall of Rome 
 and the beginnings of United Italy. There is a 
 great deal of cant and nonsense talked about 
 the narrowing effects of small communities ; 
 those who talk so take no trouble to discover or 
 to explain the facts of modern life. If there are 
 many people more narrow and insular and pre- 
 judiced against "foreigners" than the average 
 Englishman, with his boast of Empire and 
 
 186 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 Colonies and subject races, it is the German 
 with his huge European power, and the Ameri- 
 can who has a whole continent to expand in( 
 Finland, Scandinavia, Holland, Ireland, small 
 countries all of them, excel in the production of 
 people who are in the forefront of politics, art 
 and letters. The modern member of a large 
 empire is in great risk of making the same mis- 
 take as did the Roman of imperial days; he 
 mistakes size for importance. The danger is 
 even greater, for he will be content to rest in 
 his littleness, believing by mere adhesion to an 
 empire containing so many square miles he is 
 superior to the man whose native country can 
 be measured in acres, who has no possessions 
 beyond the seas. It is not, then, too paradoxical 
 to suggest that it was easier for Ibsen, the son 
 of a small nation, to see the value of intensity 
 in drama ; and it was seeing this that led him, 
 however unconsciously, to abandon the romantic 
 for the classic formula, and finally both for the 
 modernist.^ 
 
 Modernism is not this or the last century's 
 discovery. All great art has something of it: 
 
 ■ Objection has been made to the term "modernist.'' I cannot 
 say that it is satisfactory, but Mr. Symons used it many years ago 
 in discussing the verse of Henley ; and it has since then been 
 extended from things literary to music, theology and philosophy. 
 I can think of nothing to take its place, as realism, which would be 
 best, has, in the popular mind, been associated with the movement 
 that is more properly called naturalism or actualism. 
 
 187 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 for it is that in art which forces the artist to 
 remember that art is a part of life, of ordinary 
 life. It must not be confounded with naturalism, 
 that quite arbitrarily rejected one set of symbols 
 for another ; for instance in the case of Huys- 
 mans, who insisted upon the beauty of decaying 
 matter as against the beauty of life. It is rather 
 a belief that there is no need for the artist, when 
 he desires to secure a beautiful result, to mani- 
 pulate life in such a way that the spectator or 
 reader should be conscious, either pleasantly or 
 otherwise, that what he is witnessing is some- 
 thing exceptional. In painting Rembrandt is 
 the supreme Modernist as against Raphael who 
 veiled the faults of the classical tradition with 
 the glamour of the romantic renascence. Again 
 the difference between Rembrandt and let us 
 say Frith or Rops — both servants of Satan in 
 their degree — is that Rembrandt asks us to see 
 the beauty m commonplace or ugly things: 
 Frith and Rops ask us to love the beauty of 
 commonplace or ugly things. In theology 
 Rembrandt would be orthodox, a believer in 
 divine immanence: Frith and Rops are in essence 
 pantheists : and pantheism is the death of all 
 art, as it is the denial of all personality. Modern- 
 ism is, then, the foe of exclusion, though it is 
 the friend of selection ; it proceeds by way of 
 synthesis rather than analysis, and can claim for 
 
 188 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 art a larger kingdom than was ruled by the 
 classic or the romantic sceptre. It is here that 
 we find so close a connection between art and 
 life. The classical artist will be concerned 
 with form, and the romantic with an psppf^jwif 
 life, seen in terms of art ; but the modernist's 
 primary concern is not with art at all, or not 
 at least with art in the narrower sense. He 
 will never be tempted to regard humanity in 
 the mass as of less importance than learning or 
 culture; he will always, if he be a creative 
 artist, have more interest in the semi-indepen- 
 dent lives of his characters than in the fact of 
 their original dependence on him. The creative 
 artist has been compared by a modem thinker 
 to a man smoking ; he has absolute control over 
 the smoke until he has allowed it to issue from 
 his lips. From that moment the shapes the 
 smoke may take can only in part be decided by 
 his wishes ; other circumstances and other in- 
 fluences converge upon that for which he is 
 originally responsible. So the creative artist 
 makes his characters, sends them out into the 
 gusty world of dramatic incident and adventure, 
 and does not, if he be a sure and great artist, 
 allow himself to keep too close a control over 
 their development. He respects the rights of 
 his material ; that is why Dickens must remain 
 far greater than Wilkie Collins, and Poe the 
 
 189 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 superior to Gaboriau, while Hawthorne is the 
 superior of Poe. We rightly resent the action 
 of an artist who too evidently controls, to suit 
 either his prejudices or his hopes, the characters 
 he has charmed us by discovering. If Ibsen 
 had allowed Nora to relent towards Torvald we 
 should have been defrauded ; it would have been 
 the betrayal of his great trust to let Nora rest 
 satisfied with a lower spiritual ideal than that 
 which is signalled by the ominous slamming of 
 the door. Ibsen, though he is not the first 
 Modernist in imaginative literature, is the 
 greatest. Euripides had the difficulty of a tradi- 
 tional material from which it was dangerous to de- 
 part. Chaucer, who comes closest of all modern 
 authors to the ideal of Greek sanity and fear- 
 lessness, had not the depth of character or the 
 unerring insight into the deeper problems of 
 human nature that Ibsen has. Bunyan fails 
 owing to his preoccupation with a very one- 
 sided theology, and Richardson is the victim of 
 an environment full, to another age, of shallow 
 ideals and false standards of honour and virtue. 
 It would be foohsh to say that Ibsen does not 
 betray his period ; he does, but he is, largely 
 owing to his political prejudices, singularly free 
 from the worst cant of his day. In consequence 
 of this freedom we have in the later dramas 
 the completest example of the modernist spirit 
 
 190 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 in literature. After Ghosts there is no play, un- 
 less we except Hedda Gabler, in which the art 
 seems more important than the life, the machinery 
 more vital than the idea : each of the later dramas, 
 particularly The Wild Duck, The Master- Builder, 
 and The Lady from the Sea, is full of that spirit 
 of truthfulness to character which makes Ibsen's 
 work so refreshing to an age surfeited with 
 poems and imaginative fictions that betray only 
 the author's views. It is this quality, doubtless, 
 which has made some of Ibsen's later work 
 either unintelligible or unwelcome to those who 
 previously called themselves Ibsenites. The 
 freedom that he allows his characters is not 
 easily understood by lesser artists, who are for 
 ever forcing the creatures of their discovery into 
 shapes that suit their preconceived notions of 
 propriety. In Ibsen's work there is that quality 
 of magic, of ecstasy which marks the supreme 
 artist: he evokes souls by his art, and his 
 evocation produces independent spirits who 
 show us not the author's ideas but the idea 
 of life, illustrate the purpose and meaning 
 of humanity. We must not exaggerate, how- 
 ever, this independence: we must remember 
 that the origin, the artistic origin at least, 
 of the characters in the plays is Henrik Ibsen, 
 and that their temperaments, in exhibiting 
 humanity, do so through the temperament of 
 
 191 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 their originator, however subdued his indivi- 
 duality may be. 
 
 The colour of Ibsen's ideas is chiefly shown in 
 his plays by two ever-recurring factors, one con- 
 scious, the other, it would seem, unconscious to 
 the author, at least in his early manhood. The 
 conscious factor is his insistence on love as the one 
 explaining, redeeming and atoning power in the 
 world; the unconscious is the superiority of 
 womgij. There is no doubt that to a society which 
 is still acutely bi-sexual, that is, a society which 
 bases on a physical distinction a whole army of 
 emotional, intellectual, moral and spiritual dis- 
 tinctions, quite ignoring the actual facts of the 
 occurrence of so-called "feminine" character- 
 istics in men and so-called " masculine " char- 
 acteristics in women — the superiority given to 
 woman in Ibsen's theatre is a distinct blot on 
 his work. It is unfortunate that nearly always 
 decency, truth, love, reason, enthusiasm, energy 
 should belong to his women, while the men 
 stand for shiftlessness, cowardice, stupidity, 
 rascality, greed and selfishness : the only con- 
 siderable exceptions are Stockmann and Dr. 
 Wangel among the men, and Hedda Gabler 
 among the women. No doubt there were special 
 circumstances that forced Ibsen into this un- 
 fortunate loading of one sex with all the virtues 
 of strength, honour and unselfishness ; the curious 
 
 192 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 thing is that he was not, in any sense, a feminist. 
 He did not keenly support any woman's move- 
 ment, and he seems to have been annoyed, even 
 surprised, that after A Doll's House he was 
 regarded as the woman's dramatist. That is 
 why I have called this very considerable factor 
 in his work unconscious. I am sure he did not 
 deliberately set out to belittle one sex at the 
 expense of the other. How then did this very 
 marked characteristic occur ? 1 believe it sprang 
 from Ibsen's confirmed individualism. He was 
 ever concerned with the problem of the fight 
 of the individual against the state. Now that is 
 a problem which does not exist for the ordinary 
 man. The ordinary man whom Ibsen knew, 
 the business man, the self-conscious Bohemian, 
 the small politician, regards such machinery 
 of the state as he meets as perfectly natural 
 and inevitable. For the banker the police force 
 is an extension of his business, like his ledger 
 and his safes ; for the politician, the vestries and 
 the local councils are aids to his personal life. 
 Ibsen felt all these state-institutions as the foes 
 of individual liberty and progress ; but he knew 
 he was exceptional in this ; he knew no other 
 man felt that a policeman was a horrible evil 
 and a cabinet a cancer eating away the life of 
 freedom. To find men who are as individualist 
 as Ibsen was you must go to the poor or to the 
 N 193 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 criminal. Ibsen was too great an artist to be 
 satisfied with inventing types to suit his theories, 
 and he knew nothing of the poor ; so he could 
 not write as, since his day, Brieux and Mr. 
 Galsworthy have written. Then, quite by ac- 
 cident, he discovered woman : not essential 
 woman, though he knew her as poets alone 
 know, but the woman who has been created by 
 the accidents and design of national and social 
 circumstances. Women, he saw, had almost 
 exactly his feeling about institutions ; they hate 
 generalizations ; they are logical, personal, real ; 
 do not get lost in a vapid controversy about 
 conventional standards : and so we have that 
 astonishing gallery of individualists, from Nora 
 to Maia. It is not of course in every play that 
 social or political interests are involved ; but 
 when they are, the woman invariably and natu- 
 rally is found on the side of truth and against 
 that expediency which is the cement of great 
 communities. Bornick stands for the prosperity 
 of his town and the reputation of its leaders : 
 Lona can only say "Bornick must not lie." 
 Torvald stands for the sanctity of marriage, the 
 duties of motherhood and the hushing-up of 
 scandal : Nora only knows that she cannot con- 
 tinue to live a life that she knows is that of 
 a prostitute. Pastor Manders upholds family 
 honour and conjugal fidelity : Mrs. Alving cries 
 
 194 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 against him that her son is a dying lunatic be- 
 cause she lived with his father. Gregers Werle ^^JXt, 
 proclaims the ideal, will inaugurate the reign of 
 Truth and Beauty : Gina can say nothing, but 
 knows that her life with Hialmar is the best 
 thing for both of them. Rosmer struggles, rather 
 feebly, to regenerate his fellow-countrymen: 
 Rebekka saves her soul through a love that 
 Rosmer is too cowardly to accept. Solness 
 wastes his life in an envious attempt to suppress 
 the younger generation : Hilda dances back 
 into his life, reminding him that once he had 
 dreamed for her. AUmers is driven by duty 
 from study to the care of his offspring ; Rita 
 emerges from her sensual circle of desires into 
 the passion for personal service. Borkman is 
 devoured by huge commercial ambitions : Ella 
 Rentheim remembers nothing but that he kiUed 
 her love-life. And Irene, in W7ten We Dead 
 Awaken, convinces Rubek that not even art 
 has the right to use love instead of enjoying it. 
 Thus in the great majority of the dramas we 
 find the women upholding the personal, indi- 
 vidual values of things, refusing to be blinded 
 by the ethical and social dust that their men 
 keep flinging in their eyes. It is not fair to 
 conclude from all this that Ibsen deliberately 
 believed in a kind of rule-qf-thumb anarchy ; 
 that he refused to make any rules for any cases. 
 ""195 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 Those who have drawn this conclusion — Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw is the chief offender — have for- 
 gotten that Ibsen is primarily an artist, and 
 specifically a dramatic artist. For the dramatist 
 no situation is more effective than the clash 
 between public and private interests ; it is this 
 which Ibsen presents. He is not an opponent 
 of rule ; he is interested in the exceptions of life. 
 I admit that his anti-state bias does make him 
 bear rather too heavily on the individualist side: 
 but in doing this he is providing a very useful 
 corrective to the thought of an age which has 
 been almost oppressively social and generalizing. 
 He recalled, however unconsciously, to an age 
 which was essentially un-Christian and deter- 
 minist the plain rules of Christian civilization. 
 Now and then he poses a world, too ready with 
 verdict and sentence, with the old challenge 
 " Let him that is without sin among you, cast 
 the first stone at her." After all the only safe 
 general rules are positive, rules of love and 
 good-feeling and brotherhood. When you have 
 a case to judge you must not apply, with a 
 casual carelessness, some general condemnatory 
 law ; you must scrupulously and with kindness 
 take each case on its merits. AH the legal and 
 ecclesiastical and social devices for sj,ving people 
 from thinking, these are what Ibsen detested, 
 and this detestation of his was singularly sound 
 
 196 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 and clear-headed. After he had swept away 
 the conventional devices, for many people, by 
 A Doll's House and Ghosts, his follolvers exalted 
 his bold surgery into a similar device ; pressed, 
 as stupid people will, unconventionality into the 
 service of the world, and made a fetish out of a 
 superficial freedom : and soundly Ibsen chastised 
 them for their mistake in The Wild Duck. It 
 is curious how like he is in his manner of 
 thought to Dr. Johnson : " Clear your mind of 
 cant," would do well as the gist of Ibsen's 
 message to his generation. 
 
 We may admit that it is a pity that Ibsen's 
 preoccupation with anti-state theories forced 
 him to concentrate on women rather than 
 on men ; we must almost admit that great 
 advantages have sprung from this concentra- 
 tion. Whether he liked it or not, there is 
 no doubt that Ibsen is the poet and the 
 dramatist of the Modern Woman. I am not 
 using that expression to denote any strange 
 creature of the schools or the laboratories, who 
 followed learning and despised life : I doubt if 
 she ever existed outside the pages of a few 
 anti-feminist writers; unless indeed as the 
 modem counterpart of that old phenomenon, 
 the bachelor — ^by nature or circumstance. The 
 modern woman, as Ibsen saw her, diflfers from 
 the old only in being more human, more real 
 
 197 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 and more true. And she owes that increase in 
 reality to her insistence on individuality: she 
 does not despise love or motherhood, but insists 
 that these, and all other splendid things, shall 
 have their spiritual meaning and be personally 
 and freely apprehended. Ibsen believed, as 
 Plato did, that nothing can be so powerful an 
 engine for truth and rightness as Love ; that it 
 should always be the supreme consideration in 
 life ; that no one has any excuse for disobeying 
 its commands, if they are understood. Critics 
 incurably romantic in grain, like Mr, Shaw and 
 Mr. Archer, have tried to evade this deliberate 
 and passionate belief of Ibsen's ; they have — Mr. 
 Shaw has shown it again and again in his later 
 books — confused Love with that silly romantic 
 attraction which in the young is sexual and in 
 the old sentirnental. The source of this con- 
 fusion rests of course in the old idea of woman, 
 an idea from which Mr. Shaw has never freed 
 himself, as a creature mainly, if not entirely, 
 sexual and sensual. Of course if you start with 
 an idea of Love which makes it consist in sexual 
 relationship between two people whose know- 
 ledge of each other is mainly confined to that 
 sort of intercourse, it is not surprising that you 
 should try to relieve Ibsen from the suspicion 
 of having made anything so narrow the basis of 
 all personal life. What I cannot understand 
 
 198 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 is why anyone should have credited a poet of 
 Ibsen's genius with this Mohammedan theory ; 
 why credit him with Torvald's view of love 
 rather than with Nora's? The mistake is a 
 curious evidence of how a bad tradition will 
 impose itself among people whom one may 
 expect to be emancipated. 
 
 You will find men and women who, in spite of 
 their professions, talk as though Love were some- 
 thing to be ordered or countermanded at will. 
 Friendship, they say, is good ; but take care that 
 it does not spoil your chance of the best thing in 
 life. They speak of Love as something separate, 
 opposed, inimical to life's other happinesses and 
 beauties ; they make it a thing selfish and lonely 
 and aloof. They will prepare the ground for it, 
 and build up a house, and guard the door, and 
 warm the rooms ; and Love does not pause at 
 the threshold of the great empty palace, but 
 flies lightly into a happy crowded attic in some 
 teeming tenement. They would still make 
 Love depend on ignorances and shynesses and 
 false shames and falser candours ; they have put 
 away, with apparent gladness, the old convention 
 that men and women are different animals, but 
 they still hug the paraphernalia of an ancient 
 custom. All the business of Love's comedy — 
 the titter and the question and the masked 
 knowledge may be distasteful and absurd ; but 
 
 199 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 they still hanker after the glamour of love, and 
 wait eagerly from their pillows for the glimmer 
 of th& false dawn. Love for them is still that 
 Aphrodite who was born, not of Uranus, but 
 of Zeus and Dione, still the goddess who 
 can be trapped in a net for the laughter 
 of Olympus ; not the fearless goddess who 
 comes when she wills, and would not have us 
 over-anxious. 
 
 Now it is evident that all these poor, nervous, 
 neurotic ideas about sexual love are the result 
 of a convention that treats woman as something 
 less or more than human, something essentially 
 different from man. That the lover may treat 
 his beloved as goddess or brute is true ; but that 
 illusion which makes the object of love some- 
 thing non-human is as common among women 
 as among men. It is only men, and a few 
 women at some periods of their life, who have 
 ever insisted on regarding woman as a kind of 
 natural function, with affinities reaching to hell 
 and heaven, and yet condescending to visit 
 earth. Of course there have always been ex- 
 ceptions : men and women have been friends 
 since the days of Pericles and Aspasia — but we 
 would like to know what his wife thought of 
 Pericles, and even more what he thought of her. 
 Still, exceptions apart, there lives enough con- 
 scious and unconscious contempt of women as 
 
 200 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 individuals for Ibsen gradually to make their 
 claim the chief subject of his dramas. And he 
 chose to do this along the most difficult Unes. 
 He did not give us dramas in which some great 
 exceptional woman, some Joan of Arc, or 
 Ehzabeth, or Theresa, or Florence Nightingale, 
 achieved huge success in great work. He pre- 
 ferred to oppose the older type of woman, 
 whether actually presented as in Mrs. Borkman 
 or the early Nora, or defended as by Pastor 
 Manders, with the newer type, and show that 
 even in woman's own business, in loving and 
 companioning men, the new woman had the 
 superiority. He opposes with all his vigour the 
 idea that sexual love is something so exclusive 
 that it had better be the only relationship be- 
 tween a husband and wife; and he opposes it 
 by showing how infinitely more true is the 
 affection which includes comradeship, compan- 
 ionship and real intimacy. He never makes 
 the stupid mistake, so often slipped into by 
 doctrinaires and prigs, that sexual love is not 
 different from and superior to all else. He 
 knew that, as all poets do. But he knew also 
 that the difference is one you cannot define or 
 analyse or capture ; that it is one Love makes 
 for himself, and is not in the least dependent 
 on any particular form of relationship. It is a 
 mystical difference which no man can secure; 
 
 201 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 it evades all search, and is not to be persuaded 
 by tears, or entangled by laughter. What Ibsen 
 knew is that to people who are really in love, 
 all the other forms of companionship were made 
 more beautiful and more real. There should be 
 no risk of anyone attacking Ibsen as attempting 
 to exalt physical attraction, or merely vague 
 sentiment into this supreme position: he is as 
 free from that fallacy as is Plato. In the tragedy 
 of Nora and her husband, of Rita and i^Umers, 
 of Rebekka and Rosmer he has given us various 
 pictures of the disastrous effects of physical 
 attraction pursued as an end, or used as a cloak 
 to mask ignorance and lack of sensitive feeling. 
 While in Love's Comedy, The Lady from the 
 Sea and The Master-Builder he shows himself 
 the foe of that sentimental vapidity which is 
 one of the worst growths of a prudish civiliza- 
 tion. Love for Ibsen is a purifying, atoning 
 and strengthening force. It is something which 
 happens, like birth or death ; something which 
 is within our desires, but beyond our orders, 
 a true inspiration which no one deserves and 
 anyone may have. 
 
 Of course this philosophy is not explicit in 
 Ibsen ; he would not be a great dramatist if it 
 were. But there are few plays of which it is 
 not the background. It, and nothing less, is the 
 key to his insistence, so characteristic and eager, 
 
 202 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 on the need for reality in personal relationships. 
 Nothing was more typical of his age than 
 chatter about duty. Under the stress of Kantian 
 philosophy with its emphasis on the categorical 
 imperative, duty had been promoted to a quite 
 unjustified place in practical ethics. It became, 
 in popular use, an excuse for Shirking both 
 thought and action. Manders, appealed to by 
 a woman in despair, points her to her duty to 
 her husband, to society, to ideals ; reminds her 
 of everything in fact save Love and Truth. And 
 Manders represented the clerical temper of his 
 time, which differed not greatly from that which 
 haled the woman taken in adultery before Jesus 
 of Nazareth.^ Ibsen says in effect "you have 
 no duty when you have no love " ; fools took 
 this at the time to mean that a man and his 
 wife need have no love for each other, distorting 
 the obvious meaning of such a play as A Doll's 
 House. All Ibsen insists on is the grave danger 
 of any relationship that is not free and truthful 
 
 * It is a little curious that some critics of Ibsen, who are 
 strenuous upholders of Christianity, have failed to see how in his 
 rigid resolution to show that laws have their exceptions, he is 
 following, possibly unconsciously, one of the most distinctive 
 features of Our Lord's teaching. In His refusal to apply the 
 Mosaic law of adultery, the Rabbinic law of the Sabbath, the 
 Pharisaic law of cleansing, we have very noticeable examples of 
 that objection to generalization and convention which has been 
 denounced as feminist, but which many of us prefer to think of 
 as Christian. 
 
 203 
 
HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 and personal : for without the three elements of 
 truth and freedom and personal understanding 
 any real love is impossible, and without that 
 life is hardly worth the living. 
 
 This, then, is the key to Ibsen. He does not 
 assert that there is no golden rule. What he 
 asserts is that you must be sure that your rule 
 is golden ; and that the only touchstone is truth. 
 I admit that this may sound a little common- 
 place as the message of an author who has been 
 regarded as definitely eccentric and schismatic. 
 The fact is that no author of the nineteenth 
 century except Browning is definitely of the 
 centre, so directly in contact with that great 
 philosophy that had its source in Plato, and flows 
 through the Alexandrine theologians, and has 
 had so many defenders and exponents in mystics 
 all over the world. In Ibsen we have not, it is 
 true, got that gaiety and light-hearted sureness 
 which is the note of the Catholic mystic ; but 
 we have as truly as in any of that great com- 
 pany a belief in correspondence, a belief in the 
 final reality and an unconquerable trust in the 
 overwhelming might of Love. His cynicism 
 has nothing of the atrocious laughter of France ; 
 his moods of depression have nothing of the 
 heavy ugliness of Prussia ; his anger nothing 
 of the hideous plainness of Belgium. He is as 
 free as Browning from sentimentality, and as 
 
 204 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 tender as Tolstoy to the weakness that springs 
 from others' wickedness. He was more fearless 
 than any author of his time in writing what he 
 had felt, careless of criticism, heedless of insults, 
 ignoring false interpreters ; and the new century, 
 to which the Ibsen of the old controversies 
 seems, though wrongly, rather old-fashioned and 
 unwanted, may find new material for thought 
 and discussion in Ibsen the poet and the mystic. 
 
 P:^ 
 
 ^Mais, a vrai dire, 
 
 tout est idee, tout est symbole. 
 Ainsi, les formes et les attitudes d'un etre humain reveknt 
 nicessairement les emotions de son ame. Le corps exprime 
 tmymirs I'esprit dont il est enveloppe. Et pour qui sait 
 voir, la nudite offra la signification la plus riche. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Rega/rder les chefs-cPceuvre de Tart. Toute leur beaute 
 
 vient de la pensee, de Vintention que leurs auteurs ont cru 
 
 diviner dans VUnivers. 
 
 AuGUSTE Rodin. 
 
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 BY 
 
 JOHN DRINKWATER 
 
 With a Frontispiece in Photogravure. Demy Octavo 
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK SWINNERTON 
 
 With a Frontispiece in Photogravure. Demy Octavo 
 
Unifo?'m with this Volume 
 
 THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 A. MARTIN FREEMAN 
 
 " Mr. Freeman's study will be eagerly welcomed. He 
 deals with all Peacock's known writings, giving analy- 
 sis of each ; and he writes with a freshness, a searching 
 clearness and thoroughness delightful in these days of so 
 much slovenly, slipshod criticism. He sends one to 
 Peacock, and thereby does the best service a critic of 
 Peacock can do." Evening Standaed. 
 
 " It is distinguished and critical, and captures the atmo- 
 sphere of Peacock." Observer. 
 
 " We recommend it to Peacockians, and also to those 
 who would become such ; it reveals him better than any 
 anthology could. . , . The book contains biography and 
 criticism in a manner quite sufficient to equip the casual 
 reader with a knowledge of the man and his books.'' 
 
 World. 
 
 " Mr. Freeman's monograph recounts all that is known 
 about the circumstances of Peacock's career, and it con- 
 tains also a good deal of acute criticism of his writings. 
 It gives us many clues to interpretation, and helps us to 
 understand the whimsical characteristics of a man who 
 had a magic pen, and who was nothing if not original." 
 
 Standard.