Chapter 12

Nothing is more interesting than to study Ibsen's verse in the making. His sincerity to his innermost aim, the aim at the expression of himself, is seen in his refusal from the beginning to accept any poetic convention, to limit himself in poetic subject, to sift his material or clarify his metre. He has always insisted on producing something personal, thoughtful, fantastic, and essentially prosaic; and it is in a vain protest against the nature of things that he writes of _Peer Gynt_, 'My book _is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the book.' His verse was the assertion of his individuality at all costs; it was a costly tool, which he cast aside only when he found that it would not carve every material.

Ibsen's earliest work in verse has not been translated. Dr. Brandes tells us that it followed Danish models, the sagas, and the national ballads. In the prose play, _Lady Inger of Östraat_, we see the dramatist, the clever playwright, still holding on to the skirts of romance, and ready with rhetoric enough on occasion, but more concerned with plot and stage effect than with even what is interesting in the psychology of the characters. _The Vikings_, also in prose, is a piece of strong grappling with a heroic subject, with better rhetoric, and some good poetry taken straight out of the sagas, with fervour in it, and gravity; yet an experiment only, a thing not made wholly personal, nor wholly achieved. It shows how well Ibsen could do work which was not his work. In _Love's Comedy_, a modern play in verse, he is already himself. Point of view is there; materials are there; the man of science has already laid his hand upon the poet. We are told that Ibsen tried to write it in prose, failed, and fell back upon verse. It is quite likely; he has already an accomplished technique, and can put his thoughts into verse with admirable skill. But the thoughts are not born in verse, and, brilliantly rhymed as they are, they do not make poetry.

Dr. Brandes admits everything that can be said against Ibsen as a poet when he says, speaking of this play and of _Brand_:

Even if the ideas they express have not previously found utterance in poetry, they have done so in prose literature. In other words, these poems do not set forth new thoughts, but translate into metre and rhyme thoughts already expressed.

_Love's Comedy_ is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific, prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as it sticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and tries to lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubbles and children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate. There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama; realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of a verse which has some of the qualities of Pope and some of the qualities of Swift; but the dramatist is still content that his puppets shall have the air of puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip; they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The verse comes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him and poetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, but only under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet, like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whom cynicism should be but one of the tones of his speech, the gestures of his attitude. With Ibsen it is a petty anger, an anger against nature, and it leads to a transcendentalism which is empty and outside nature.

The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal suicide such as that in _Rosmersholm_, or may feed the brain on some air unbreathable by the body, as in _When we Dead Awaken_. It is the old idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of self-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt of nature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism of nature.

Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in _Love's Comedy_. In the prose play which followed, _The Pretenders_, which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a historical drama, there is a much nearer approach to poetry. The stagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect like thunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, above all, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there is both beauty and wisdom.

It was with the publication of _Brand_ that Ibsen became famous, not only in his own country, but throughout Europe. The poem has been seriously compared, even in England, with _Hamlet_; even in Germany with _Faust_. A better comparison is that which Mr. Gosse has made with Sidney Dobell's _Balder_. It is full of satire and common-sense, of which there is little enough in _Balder_: but not _Balder_ is more abstract, or more inhuman in its action. Types, not people, move in it; their speech is doctrine, not utterance; it is rather a tract than a poem. The technique of the verse, if we can judge it from the brilliant translation of Professor Herford, which reads almost everywhere like an original, is more than sufficient for its purpose; all this argumentative and abstract and realistic material finds adequate expression in a verse which has aptly been compared with the verse of Browning's _Christmas-eve and Easter-day_. The comparison may be carried further, and it is disastrous to Ibsen. Browning deals with hard matter, and can be boisterous; but he is never, as Ibsen is always, pedestrian. The poet, though, like St. Michael, he carry a sword, must, like St. Michael, have wings. Ibsen has no wings.

But there is another comparison by which I think we can determine more precisely the station and quality of _Brand_ as poetry. Take any one of the vigorous and vivid statements of dogma, which are the very kernel of the poem, and compare them with a few lines from Blake's _Everlasting Gospel_. There every line, with all its fighting force, is pure poetry; it was conceived as poetry, born as poetry, and can be changed into no other substance. Here we find a vigorous technique fitting striking thought into good swinging verse, with abundance of apt metaphor; but where is the vision, the essence, which distinguishes it from what, written in prose, would have lost nothing? Ibsen writes out of the intellect, adding fancy and emotion as he goes; but in Blake every line leaps forth like lightning from a cloud.

The motto of _Brand_ was 'all or nothing'; that of _Peer Gynt_ 'to be master of the situation.' Both are studies of egoism, in the finding and losing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of _Peer Gynt_ Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice.' It is Ibsen in high spirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequin of a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads in it and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded, because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of two elements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. The first comes and goes for the most part with Peer and his mother; and all this brings Norwegian soil with it, and is alive. The satire is fierce, local, and fantastic. Out of the two comes a clashing thing which may itself suggest, as has been said, the immense contrast between Norwegian summer, which is day, and winter, which is night. Grieg's music, childish, mumbling, singing, leaping, and sombre, has aptly illustrated it. It was a thing done on a holiday, for a holiday. It was of this that Ibsen said he could not have written it any nearer home than Ischia and Sorrento. But is it, for all its splendid scraps and patches, a single masterpiece? is it, above all, a poem? The idea, certainly, is one and coherent; every scene is an illustration of that idea; but is it born of that idea? Is it, more than once or twice, inevitable? What touches at times upon poetry is the folk element; the irony at times has poetic substance in it; but this glimmer of poetic substance, which comes and goes, is lost for the most part among mists and vapours, and under artificial light. That poet which exists somewhere in Ibsen, rarely quite out of sight, never wholly at liberty, comes into this queer dance of ideas and humours, and gives it, certainly, the main value it has. But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of the poet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led away into bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its prose equivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally gives us in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind of rhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no place in poetry.

In _The League of Youth_ Ibsen takes finally the step which he had half taken in _Loves Comedy_. 'In my new comedy,' he writes to Dr. Brandes, 'you will find the common order of things--no strong emotions, no deep feelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts.' He adds: 'It is written in prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I have paid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I have accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact without a single "aside." 'The play is hardly more than a good farce; the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probability on the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order of things' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but the satirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and no doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to get the mechanism in order.

After _The League of Youth_ Ibsen tells us that he tried to 'seek salvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old scheme for a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act plays which make up _Emperor and Galilean_. He tells us that it is the first work which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that it contains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demanded of me so long.' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirely realistic work,' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual life which I am putting into this book ... and the historical subject chosen has a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own time than one might at first imagine.' How great a relief it must have been, after the beer and sausages of _The League of Youth_, to go back to an old cool wine, no one can read _Emperor and Galilean_ and doubt. It is a relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial, the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever _Peer Gynt_ was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the book is or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw a fragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried to reproduce what I saw.' But in the play itself this intention comes and goes; and, while some of it reminds one of _Salammbô_ in its attempt to treat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to the exposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance, after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers of historical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideas more fundamental than anything in _The League of Youth_; but, as in almost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point, satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is not yet, as the later irony is to be, a deepening, and thus a justification, of the realism.

Eight years passed between _The League of Youth_ and _The Pillars of Society_; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has made for itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; the mechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a more conventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place of satire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concerned with society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusation against society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling of a lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be saying to us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools of society. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here is your respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father and your mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of heredity whispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hidden behind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world.

Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that _Ghosts_ 'preaches nothing at all.' This pursuit of truth to its most secret hiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogma visibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogma is terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless, we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I would take _A Doll's House_, _Ghosts_, and _The Wild Duck_ as Ibsen's three central plays, the plays in which his method completely attained its end, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; and this work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, is alive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, _An Enemy of the People_, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had attacked _Ghosts_ for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission. Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people who suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies, are terribly alive. _A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in which the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfected his art of illusion; beyond _A Doll's House_ and _Ghosts_ dramatic illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles, but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet.

For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With _The Wild Duck_ fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in _Ghosts_, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination. The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and is discontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He would extend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to be extended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in _The Wild Duck_ passes, in _Rosmersholm_, in which the problems of _Love's Comedy_ are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form, not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In _The Lady from the Sea_, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Is it not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Is it not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality and giving us no spiritual reality in its place?

_Hedda Gabler_ is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:

It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day.'

The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of 'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in _The Master-builder_ it is 'harps in the air'; in _Little Eyolf_ it takes human form and becomes the Rat-wife; in _John Gabriel Borkman_ it drops to the tag of 'a dead man and two shadows'; in _When we Dead Awaken_ there is nothing but icy allegory. All that queer excitement of _The Master-builder_, that 'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself at home there? is it not rather _Peer Gynt_ back again, and the ride through the air on the back of the reindeer?

In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back, though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife in _Little Eyolf_; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination, neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In _John Gabriel Borkman_, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no longer content to concern himself with the old material, lies or misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but will have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In _When we Dead Awaken_ all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look their parts.

In these last plays, with their many splendid qualities, not bound together and concentrated as in _Ghosts_, we see the revenge of the imagination upon the realist, who has come to be no longer interested in the action of society upon the individual, but in the individual as a soul to be lost or saved. The man of science has discovered the soul, and does not altogether know what to do with it. He has settled its limits, set it to work in space and time, laid bare some of its secrets, shown its 'physical basis.' And now certain eccentricities in it begin to beckon to him; he would follow the soul into the darkness, but it is dark to him; he can but strain after it as it flutters. In the preface to the collected edition of his plays, published in 1901, Maeterlinck has pointed out, as one still standing at the cross-roads might point out to those who have followed him so far on his way, the great uncertainty in which the poet, the dramatist of to-day, finds himself, as what seems to be known or conjectured of 'the laws of nature' is forced upon him, making the old, magnificently dramatic opportunities of the ideas of fate, of eternal justice, no longer possible for him to use.

_Le poète dramatique est obligé de faire descendre dans la vie réelle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'idée qu'il se fait de l'inconnu. Il faut qu'il nous montre de quelle façon, sous quelle forme, dans quelles conditions, d'après quelles lois, à quelle fin, agissent sur nos destinées les puissances supérieures, les influences inintelligibles, les principes infinis, dont, en tant que poète, il est persuadé que l'univers est plein. Et comme il est arrivé à une heure où loyalement il lui est à peu près impossible d'admettre les anciennes, et où celles qui les doivent remplacer ne sont pas encore déterminées, n'ont pas encore de nom, il hésite, tâtonne, et s'il veut rester absolument sincère, il n'ose plus se risquer hors de la réalité immédiate. Il se borne à étudier les sentiments humains dans leurs effets matériels et psychologiques._

So long as Ibsen does this, he achieves great and solid things; and in _Ghosts_ a scientific dogma, the law or theory of heredity, has for once taken the place of fate, and almost persuaded us that science, if it takes poetry from us, can restore to us a kind of poetry. But, as Maeterlinck has seen, as it is impossible not to see,

_quand Ibsen, dans d'autres drames, essaie de relier à d'autres mystères les gestes de ses hommes en mal de conscience exceptionelle ou de ses femmes hallucinées, il faut convenir que, si l'atmosphère qu'il parvient à créer est étrange et troublante, elle est rarement saine et respirable, parce qu'elle est rarement raisonnable et réele._

From the time when, in _A Doll's House_, Ibsen's puppets came to life, they have refused ever since to be put back into their boxes. The manager may play what tricks with them he pleases, but he cannot get them back into their boxes. They are alive, and they live with a weird, spectacular, but irrevocable life. But, after the last play of all, the dramatic epilogue, _When we Dead Awaken_, the puppets have gone back into their boxes. Now they have come to obey the manager, and to make mysterious gestures which they do not understand, and to speak in images and take them for literal truths. Even their spectral life has gone out of them; they are rigid now, and only the strings set them dancing. The puppets had come to life, they had lived the actual life of the earth; and then a desire of the impossible, the desire of a life rarefied beyond human limits, took their human life from them, and they were puppets again. The epilogue to the plays is the apostasy of the man of science, and, as with all apostates, his new faith is not a vital thing; the poet was not really there to reawaken.