Part 22

Ibsen left Bergen to take the position of director at the Norwegian Theatre, Christiania. He remained there until 1862, staging all manner of plays, from Shakespeare to Scribe. The value of these years was incalculable in his technical development. A poet born and by self-discipline developed, he was now master of a difficult art, an art that later he never lost, even when, weary of the conventional comedy of manners, he sought to spiritualize the form and give us the psychology of commonplace souls. It may be noted that, despite the violinist Ole Bull's generous support, the new theatre endured only five years. More than passing stress should be laid upon this formative period. His experience of these silent years was bitter, but rich in spiritual recompense. After some difficulty in securing a paltry pension from his government, Ibsen was enabled to leave Norway, which had become a charnel-house to him since the Danish war with Germany, and with his young wife he went to Rome. Thenceforth his was a gypsy career. He lived in Rome, in Dresden, in Munich, and again in Rome. He spent his summers in the Austrian Tyrol, at Sorrento, and occasionally in his own land. His was a self-imposed exile, and he did not return to Christiania to reside permanently until an old, but famous man. Silent, unsociable, a man of harsh moods, he was to those who knew him an upright character, an ideal husband and father. His married life had no history, a sure sign of happiness, for he was well mated. Yet one feels that, despite his wealth, his renown, existence was for him a _via dolorosa_. Ever the solitary dreamer, he wrote a play about every two or three years, and from the very beginning of his exile the effect in Norway was like unto the explosion of a bomb-shell. Not wasting time in answering his critics, it was nevertheless remarked that each new piece was a veiled reply to slanderous criticism. Ghosts was absolutely intended as an answer to the attacks upon A Doll's House; here is what Nora would have become if she had been a dutiful wife, declares Ibsen, in effect; and we see Mrs. Alving in her motherly agonies. The counterblast to the criticism of Ghosts was An Enemy of the People; Dr. Stockman is easily detected as a partial portrait of Ibsen.

Georg Brandes, to whom the poet owes many ideas as well as sound criticism, said that early in his life a lyric Pegasus had been killed under Ibsen This striking hint of his sacrifice is supplemented by a letter in which he compared the education of a poet to that of a dancing bear. The bear is tied in a brewer's vat and a slow fire is built under the vat; the wretched animal is then forced to dance. Life forces the poet to dance by means quite as painful; he dances and the tears roll down his cheeks all the while. Ibsen forsook poetry for prose and--the dividing line never to be recrossed is clearly indicated between Emperor and Galilean and The Pillars of Society--he bestowed upon his country three specimens of his poetic genius. As Italy fructified the genius of Goethe, so it touched as with a glowing coal the lips of the young Northman. Brand, a noble epic, startled and horrified Norway. In Rome Ibsen regained his equilibrium. He saw his country and countrymen more sanely, more steadily, though there is a terrible fund of bitterness in this dramatic poem. The local politics of Christiania no longer irritated him, and in the hot, beautiful South he dreamed of the North, of his beloved fiords and mountains, of ice and avalanche, of troll and saga. Luckily for those who have not mastered Norwegian, C. H. Herford's translation of Brand exists, and, while the translator deplores his sins of omission, it is a work--as are the English versions of the prose plays by William Archer--that gives one an excellent idea of the original. In Brand (1866) Ibsen is at his furthest extremity from compromise. This clergyman sacrifices his mother, his wife, his child, his own life, to a frosty ideal: "All or nothing." He is implacable in his ire against worldliness, in his contempt of churchmen that believe in half-way measures. He perishes on the heights as a voice proclaims, "He is the God of Love." Greatly imaginative, charged with spiritual spleen and wisdom, Brand at once placed Ibsen among the mighty.

He followed it with a new Odyssey of his soul, the amazing Peer Gynt (1867), in which his humour, hitherto a latent quality, his fantasy, bold invention, and the poetic evocation of the faithful, exquisite Solveig, are further testimony to his breadth of resource. Peer Gynt is all that Brand was not: whimsical, worldly, fantastic, weak-willed, not so vicious as perverse; he is very selfish, one who was to himself sufficient, therefore a failure. The will, if it frees, may also kill. It killed the soul of Peer. There are pages of unflagging humour, poetry, and observation; scene dissolves into scene; Peer travels over half the earth, is rich, is successful, is poor; and at the end meets the Button-Moulder, that ironical shadow who tells him what he has become. We hear the Boyg, the spirit of compromise, with its huge, deadly, coiling lengths, gruffly bid Peer to "go around." Facts of life are to be slunk about, never to be faced. Peer comes to harbour in the arms of his deserted Solveig. The resounding sarcasm, the ferociousness of the attack on all the idols of the national cavern, raised a storm in Norway that did not abate for years. Ibsen was again a target for the bolts of critical and public hatred. Peer Gynt is the Scandinavian Faust.

Having purged his soul of this perilous stuff, the poet, in 1873, finished his double drama Emperor and Galilean, not a success dramatically, but a strong, interesting work for the library, though it saw the footlights at Berlin, Leipsic, and Christiania. The apostate Emperor Julian is the protagonist. We discern Ibsen the mystic philosopher longing for his Third Kingdom.

After a silence of four years The Pillars of Society appeared. Like its predecessor in the same _genre_, The Young Men's League, it is a prose drama, a study of manners, and a scathing arraignment of civic dishonesty. All the rancour of its author against the bourgeois hypocrisy of his countrymen comes to the surface; as in The Young Men's League the vacillating nature of the shallow politician is laid bare. It seems a trifle banal now, though the canvas is large, the figures animated. One recalls Augier without his Gallic _esprit_, rather than the later Ibsen. A Doll's House was once a household word, as was Ghosts (1881). There is no need now to retell the story of either play. Ghosts, in particular, has an antique quality, the _dénouement_ leaves us shivering. It may be set down as the strongest play of the nineteenth century, and also the most harrowing. Its intensity borders on the hallucinatory. We involuntarily recall the last act of Tristan and Isolde or the final movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic symphony. It is the shrill discord between the mediocre creatures involved and the ghastly punishment meted out to the innocent that agitates and depresses us. Here are human souls illuminated as if by a lightning flash; we long for the anticipated thunder. It does not sound. The drama ends in silence--one of those pauses (Ibsen employs the pause as does a musical composer) which leaves the spectator unstrung. The helpless sense of hovering about the edge of a bottomless gulf is engendered by this play. No man could have written it but Ibsen, and we hope that no man will ever attempt a parallel performance, for such art modulates across the borderland of the pathologic.

The Wild Duck (1884) followed An Enemy of the People (1882). It is the most puzzling of the prose dramas except The Master-Builder, for in it Ibsen deliberately mocks himself and his ideals. It is, nevertheless, a profoundly human and moving work. Gina Ekdal, the wholesome, sensible wife of Ekdal, the charlatan photographer--a _revenant_ of Peer Gynt--has been called a feminine Sancho Panza. Gregers Werle, the meddlesome truth-teller; Relling--a sardonic incarnation of the author--who believes in feeding humanity on the "life-lie" to maintain its courage; the tiny Hedwig, sweetest and freshest of Ibsen's girls--these form a memorable _ensemble_. And how the piece plays! Humour and pathos alternate, while the symbol is not so remote that an average audience need miss its meaning. The end is cruel. Ibsen is often cruel, with the passionless indifference of the serene Buddha. But he is ever logical. Nora must leave her husband's house--a "happy ending" would be ridiculous--and Hedwig must be sacrificed instead of the wild duck, or her fool of a father. There is a battalion of minor characters in the Ibsen plays who recall Dickens by their grotesque, sympathetic physiognomies. To deny this dramatist humour is to miss a third of his qualities. His is not the ventripotent humour of Rabelais or Cervantes; it seldom leaves us without the feeling that the poet is slyly laughing at us, not with us, though in the early comedies there are many broad and telling strokes.

Rosmersholm (1886) is a study of two temperaments. Rebekka West is another malevolent portrait in his gallery of dangerous and antipathetic women. She ruins Rosmersholm, ruins herself, because she does not discover this true self until too late. The play illustrates the extraordinary technique of the master. It seems to have been written backward; until the third act we are not aware that the peaceful home of the Rosmersholms is the battle-field of a malignant soul. The Lady from the Sea (1888) illustrates the thesis that love must be free. The allegory is rather strained and in performance the play lacks poetic glamour. Hedda Gabler (1890) is a masterpiece. A more selfish, vicious, cold nature than Hedda's never stepped from the page of a Russian novel--Becky Sharp and Madame Marneffe are lovable persons in comparison. She is not in the slightest degree like the stage "adventuress," but is a magnificent example of egoism magnificently delineated and is the true sister in fiction of Julien Sorel. That she is dramatically worth the while is beside the question. Her ending by a pistol shot is justice itself; alive she fascinates as does some exotic reptile. She is representative of her species, the loveless woman, the petty hater, a Lady Macbeth reversed. Ibsen has studied her with the same care and curiosity he bestowed upon the homely Gina Ekdal.

His Master-Builder (1892) is the beginning of the last cycle. A true interior drama, we enter here into the region of the symbolical. With Ibsen the symbol is always an image, never an abstraction, a state of sensibility, not a formula, and the student may winnow many examples from The Pretenders (1864), with its "kingship" idea, to the Epilogue. Solness stands on the heights only to perish, but in the full possession of his soul. Hilda Wangel is one of the most perplexing characters to realise in the modern theatre. She, with her cruelty and loveliness of perfect youth, is the work of a sorcerer who holds us spellbound while the souls he has created by his black art slowly betray themselves. It may be said that all this is not the art of the normal theatre. Very true. It more nearly resembles a dramatic confessional with a hidden auditory bewitched into listening to secrets never suspected of the humanity that hedges us about in street or home. Ibsen is clairvoyant. He takes the most familiar material and holds it in the light of his imagination; straightway we see a new world, a northern dance of death, like the ferocious pictures of his fellow-countryman, the painter Edvard Munch.

Little Eyolf (1894) is fairly plain reading, with some fine overtones of suffering and self-abnegation. Its lesson is wholly satisfying. John Gabriel Borkman (1896), written at an age when most poets show declining power, is another monument to the vigour and genius of Ibsen. The story winds about the shattered career of a financier. There is a secondary plot, in which the parental curses come home to roost--the son, carefully reared to wipe away the stain from his father's name, prefers Paris and a rollicking life. The desolation under this roof-tree is almost epical: two sisters in deadly antagonism, a blasted man, the old wolf, whose footfalls in the chamber above become absolutely sinister as the play progresses, are made to face the hard logic of their misspent lives. The doctrine of compensation has never had such an exponent as Ibsen.

In the last of his published plays, When We Dead Awake (1899), we find earlier and familiar themes developed at moments with contrapuntal mastery. Rubek, the sculptor, has aroused a love that he never dared to face. He married the wrong woman. His early dream, the inspiration of his master work, he has lost. His art withers. And when he meets his Irene, her mind is full of wandering ghosts. To the heights, to the same peaks that Brand climbed, they both must mount, and there they are destroyed, as was Brand, by an avalanche. Eros is the triumphant god of the aged magician.

III

It must be apparent to those who have not read or seen the Ibsen plays that, despite this huddled and foreshortened account, they are in essence quite different from what has been reported of them. Idealistic, symbolistic, moral, and ennobling, the Ibsen drama was so vilified by malice and ignorance that its very name was a portent of evil. Mad or wicked Ibsen is not. His scheme of life and morals is often oblique and paradoxical, his interpretation of truths so elliptical that we are confused. But he is essentially sound. He believes in the moral continuity of the universe. His astounding energy is a moral energy. Salvation by good works is his burden. The chief thing is to be strong in your faith. He despises the weak, not the strong sinner. His Supermen are the bankrupts of romantic heroism. His strong man is frequently wrong-headed; but the weakling works the real mischief. Never admit you are beaten. Begin at the bottom twenty times, and when the top is achieved die, or else look for loftier peaks to climb. Ibsen exalts strength. His "ice-church" is chilly; the lungs drink in with difficulty the buffeting breezes on his heights; yet how bracing, how inspiring, is this austere place of worship. Bad as is mankind, Ibsen, who was ever in advance of his contemporaries, believed in its possibility for betterment. Here the optimist speaks. Brand's spiritual pride is his downfall; nevertheless, Ibsen, an aristocratic thinker, believes that of pride one cannot have too much. He recognised the selfish and hollow foundation of all "humanitarian" movements. He is a sign-post for the twentieth century when the aristocratic of spirit must enter into combat with the herd instinct of a depressing socialism. His influence has been tremendous. His plays teem with the general ideas of his century. His chief value lies in the beauty of his art; his is the rare case of the master-singer rounding a long life with his master works. He brought to the theatre new ideas; he changed forever the dramatic map of Europe; he originated a new method of surprising life, capturing it and forcing it to give up a moiety of its mystery for the uses of a difficult and recondite art. He fashioned character anew. And he pushed resolutely into the mist that surrounded the human soul, his Diogenes lantern glimmering, his brave, lonely heart undaunted by the silence and the solitude. His message? Who shall say? He asks questions, and, patterning after nature, he seldom answers them. When his ideas sicken and die--he asserted that the greatest truth outlives its usefulness in time, and it may not be denied that his drama is a dissolvent; already the early plays are in historical twilight and the woman question of his day is for us something quite different--his art will endure. Henrik Ibsen was a man of heroic fortitude. His plays are a bold and stimulating spectacle for the spirit. Should we ask more of a dramatic poet?

X

MAX STIRNER

I

In 1888 John Henry Mackay, the Scottish-German poet, while at the British Museum reading Lange's History of Materialism, encountered the name of Max Stirner and a brief criticism of his forgotten book, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Only One and His Property; in French translated L'Unique et sa Propriété, and in the first English translation more aptly and euphoniously entitled The Ego and His Own). His curiosity excited, Mackay, who is an anarchist, procured after some difficulty a copy of the work, and so greatly was he stirred that for ten years he gave himself up to the study of Stirner and his teachings, and after incredible painstaking published in 1898 the story of his life. (Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk: John Henry Mackay.) To Mackay's labours we owe all we know of a man who was as absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed. But some advanced spirits had read Stirner's book, the most revolutionary ever written, and had felt its influence. Let us name two: Henrik Ibsen and Frederick Nietzsche. Though the name of Stirner is not quoted by Nietzsche, he nevertheless recommended Stirner to a favourite pupil of his, Professor Baumgartner at Basel University. This was in 1874.

One hot August afternoon in the year 1896 at Bayreuth, I was standing in the Marktplatz when a member of the Wagner Theatre pointed out to me a house opposite, at the corner of the Maximilianstrasse, and said: "Do you see that house with the double gables? A man was born there whose name will be green when Jean Paul and Richard Wagner are forgotten." It was too large a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name. "Max Stirner," he replied. "The crazy Hegelian," I retorted. "You have read him, then?" "No; but you haven't read Nordau." It was true. All fire and flame at that time for Nietzsche, I did not realise that the poet and rhapsodist had forerunners. My friend sniffed at Nietzsche's name; Nietzsche for him was an aristocrat, not an Individualist--in reality, a lyric expounder of Bismarck's gospel of blood and iron. Wagner's adversary would, with Renan, place mankind under the yoke of a more exacting tyranny than Socialism, the tyranny of Culture, of the Superman. Ibsen, who had studied both Kierkegaard and Stirner--witness Brand and Peer Gynt--Ibsen was much nearer to the champion of the Ego than Nietzsche. Yet it is the dithyrambic author of Zarathustra who is responsible, with Mackay, for the recrudescence of Stirner's teachings.

Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner its prophet, or, if you will, its philosopher. Later I secured the book, which had been reprinted in the cheap edition of Reclam (1882). It seemed colourless, or rather gray, set against the glory and gorgeous rhetoric of Nietzsche. I could not see then what I saw a decade later--that Nietzsche had used Stirner as a springboard, as a point of departure, and that the Individual had vastly different meanings to those diverse temperaments. But Stirner displayed the courage of an explorer in search of the north pole of the Ego.

The man whose theories would make a _tabula rasa_ of civilisation, was born at Bayreuth, October 25, 1806, and died at Berlin June 25, 1856. His right name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, Max Stirner being a nickname bestowed upon him by his lively comrades in Berlin because of his very high and massive forehead. His father was a maker of wind instruments, who died six months after his son's birth. His mother remarried, and his stepfather proved a kind protector. Nothing of external importance occurred in the life of Max Stirner that might place him apart from his fellow-students. He was very industrious over his books at Bayreuth, and when he became a student at the Berlin University he attended the lectures regularly, preparing himself for a teacher's profession. He mastered the classics, modern philosophy, and modern languages. But he did not win a doctor's degree; just before examinations his mother became ill with a mental malady (a fact his critics have noted) and the son dutifully gave up everything so as to be near her. After her death he married a girl who died within a short time. Later, in 1843, his second wife was Marie Dähnhardt, a very "advanced" young woman, who came from Schwerin to Berlin to lead a "free" life. She met Stirner in the Hippel circle, at a Weinstube in the Friedrichstrasse, where radical young thinkers gathered: Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Jordan, Julius Faucher, and other stormy insurgents. She had, it is said, about 10,000 thalers. She was married with the ring wrenched from a witness's purse--her bridegroom had forgotten to provide one. He was not a practical man; if he had been he would hardly have written The Ego and His Own.

It was finished between the years 1843 and 1845; the latter date it was published. It created a stir, though the censor did not seriously interfere with it; its attacks on the prevailing government were veiled. In Germany rebellion on the psychic plane expresses itself in metaphysics; in Poland and Russia music is the safer medium. Feuerbach, Hess, and Szeliga answered Stirner's terrible arraignment of society, but men's thoughts were interested elsewhere, and with the revolt of 1848 Stirner was quite effaced. He had taught for five years in a fashionable school for young ladies; he had written for several periodicals, and translated extracts from the works of Say and Adam Smith.

After his book appeared, his relations with his wife became uneasy. Late in 1846 or early in 1847 she left him and went to London, where she supported herself by writing; later she inherited a small sum from a sister, visited Australia, married a labourer there, and became a washerwoman. In 1897 Mackay wrote to her in London, asking her for some facts in the life of her husband. She replied tartly that she was not willing to revive her past; that her husband had been too much of an egotist to keep friends, and was "very sly." This was all he could extort from the woman, who evidently had never understood her husband and execrated his memory, probably because her little fortune was swallowed up by their mutual improvidence. Another appeal only elicited the answer that "Mary Smith is preparing for death"--she had become a Roman Catholic. It is the irony of things in general that his book is dedicated to "My Sweetheart, Marie Dähnhardt."