Part 10

Knud Ibsen belonged to the aristocracy of Skien, and his house was a centre of its social life. When Henrik was eight years old there was an end of this, for his father became a bankrupt. After the catastrophe the family retired to a small and humble home outside Skien, where they lived with a frugality which was in marked contrast with their former life. There can be no doubt that this sudden change of circumstances, and the insight which it brought into the social cleavage of a provincial town, counted for much in Ibsen’s development. It is certain that at this period his marked individuality began to be perceived. He did not play like the other children; while they romped in the yard, he retired into a little inclosure in an alley that led to the kitchen, and barricaded himself against the heedless incursions of the younger members of the family. Here he kept guard, not only in summer, but in the depth of winter. It is clear that even at this early age Ibsen had reached the point of proud isolation and defiance of his fellow-citizens which Stockmann ultimately attained. One of his sisters describes how they used to throw stones and snowballs at his retreat to make him come out to join their play, but when he could no longer withstand the attack and yielded to the assailants, he could display no skill in any kind of sport, and soon retired again to his den. Reading appears to have been one of his chief occupations there, and Jaeger assures us that the words which many years afterwards Ibsen put into the mouth of the little girl Hedwig, who is so pathetic and tender a figure in one of his latest dramas, “Vildanden,” contain a reminiscence of childhood. “And do you read the books?” asked Gregers. “Oh, yes, when I can. But most of them are English, and I can’t read those. But then I can look at the pictures. There is one big black book, called Harryson’s ‘History of London;’ it must be a hundred years old, and that has such a number of pictures in it. First there is a picture of Death with an hourglass and a girl. I think that is hideous. But then there are all sorts of other pictures, with churches and castles and streets and great ships that sail on the sea.” He also amused himself with pencil and colour-box. Meanwhile he went to school, going through the usual course and learning a little Latin; he appears to have taken a special interest in the Biblical instruction. At fourteen he was confirmed, and the time came for him to make his way in the world.

At this period he wished to become a painter; he devoted himself with zeal to drawing, and an interest in painting has remained with him, the formation of an excellent little collection of Renaissance pictures becoming in later life one of his chief hobbies. In the existing state of the family means, this career was out of the question, and he was sent to an apothecary at Grimstad, a little town containing at that time not more than 800 inhabitants. The apothecary’s shop, Jaeger remarks, is the place where all the loungers meet in the evening to discuss the events of the day, and doubtless the apothecary’s shop was an element in the education of the future dramatist. In his interesting preface to the second edition of “Catilina” he has himself described the five years of development that he went through in this little town. He did not wish to become a chemist; he would become a student and study medicine. At the same time his poetical activity and the eventful year of 1848 came to arouse in the silent, solitary boy a healthy interest in the outside world.

It was while reading Sallust and Cicero for his matriculation examination that he conceived, and wrote at midnight, his first play, “Catilina.” With the help of two enthusiastic young friends the tragedy was published and some thirty copies sold--a result which did not permit of the proposed tour in the East on which the three friends had decided to expend the profits of the sale. Ibsen was now in his twenty-second year, and he came up to Christiania to carry on his studies at the school of Heltberg, who seems to have had a singularly stimulating influence on young men, and at the university. Here Ibsen was the comrade of Björnson, Jonas Lie, and others who have since become famous. At a later date Björnson condensed his youthful impression of his friend in two vigorous lines:

“Tense and lean, the colour of gypsum, Behind a vast coal-black beard, Henrik Ibsen.”

The period now arrived at which Ibsen’s career was definitely settled. He had been making several unsuccessful literary attempts at Christiania, having finally abandoned the intention to study medicine, when, in 1851, the famous violinist, Ole Bull, who has done so much to give artistic shape and energy to the modern Norwegian spirit, gave him an appointment at the National Theatre which he had recently established at Bergen. Ibsen’s prentice hand was now trained by the writing of several dramas not included among his published works; and, like Shakespeare and Molière in somewhat similar circumstances, he here acquired his mastery of the technical demands of dramatic form. In 1855 his apprenticeship may be said to have ended, and he produced “Fru Inger til Östraat” (Dame Inger of Östraat), an historical prose drama of great energy and concentration. In 1858 he married Susanna Thoresen, the daughter of a Bergen clergyman, whose second wife, Magdalene Thoresen, is a well-known authoress. At the same period he was appointed artistic director of the Norwegian theatre at Christiania, a post previously occupied by Björnson, who had just inaugurated the Norwegian peasant novel by the publication of “Synnöve Solbakken.” In 1864, having acquired the means, Ibsen found it desirable to quit the somewhat provincial and uncongenial atmosphere of his native country, and has since lived in Rome, in Ischia, in Dresden, and at other places, but mainly at Munich, producing on an average a drama every two years. In 1885 he revisited Norway. Time had brought its revenges, and he was enthusiastically received everywhere. At Drontheim he made a remarkable speech to a club of working-men. “Mere democracy,” he said, “cannot solve the social question. An element of aristocracy must be introduced into our life. Of course I do not mean the aristocracy of birth or of the purse, or even the aristocracy of intellect. I mean the aristocracy of character, of will, of mind. That only can free us. From two groups will this aristocracy I hope for come to our people--from our women and our workmen. The revolution in the social condition, now preparing in Europe, is chiefly concerned with the future of the workers and the women. In this I place all my hopes and expectations; for this I will work all my life and with all my strength.” In private conversation, it is said, Ibsen describes himself as a Socialist, although he has not identified himself with any definite school of Socialism.

In personal appearance he is rather short, but impressive and very vigorous. He has a peculiarly broad and high forehead, with small, keen, blue-grey eyes “which seem to penetrate to the heart of things.” His firm and compressed mouth is characteristic of “the man of the iron will,” as he has been called by a fellow-countryman. Altogether it is a remarkable and significant face, clear-seeing and alert, with a decisive energy of will about it that none can fail to recognize. It is far indeed from the typical “pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face.” In middle age it recalled, rather, the faces of some of our most distinguished surgeons; as is perhaps meet in the case of a writer who has used so skilful and daring a scalpel to cut to the core of social diseases. In society, although he likes talking to the common people, Ibsen is usually reserved and silent; or his conversation deals with the most ordinary topics; “he talks like a wholesale tradesman,” it has been said.

Ibsen’s dramas (excluding two or three which have not been published) may be conveniently divided into three groups, but the division is a rough one, for the groups merge one into another; Ibsen’s artistic development has been gradual and continuous.--1. Historical and Legendary Dramas, chiefly in Prose: The youthful “Catilina” (written in 1850, but revised at a later period), which stands by itself, and contains the germ of much of his later work; “Fru Inger til Östraat” (Dame Inger of Östraat), 1855, an effective melodramatic play of great technical skill; “Gildet paa Solhaug” (The Feast at Solhaug), an historical play of the fourteenth century, written in 1855, and reprinted in 1883, with a preface explaining its genesis; “Hærmændene paa Helgeland” (The Warriors at Helgeland), 1858, a noble version of the Volsunga-Saga, here brought down to more historical times, so as to present a vivid and human picture of the Viking period; “Kongs-emnerne” (The Pretenders), 1864, dealing with Norwegian history in the twelfth century; “Keiser og Galilæer” (Emperor and Galilean), finished in 1873, but begun many years earlier. 2. Dramatic Poems: “Kjærlighedens Komedie” (Love’s Comedy), 1862; “Brand,” 1866; “Peer Gynt,” 1867. 3. Social Dramas: “De Unges Forbund” (The Young Men’s League), 1869; “Samfundets Stötter” (The Pillars of Society), 1877; “Et Dukkehjem” (A Doll’s House), 1879; “Gengangere” (Ghosts), 1881; “En Folkefiende” (An Enemy of Society), 1882; “Vildanden” (The Wild Duck), 1884; “Rosmersholm,” 1886; “Fruen fra Havet” (The Lady from the Sea), 1888.

“Hærmændene paa Helgeland” is Ibsen’s first great drama; it has, indeed, been called the most perfect of his plays. The antique form and substance which he imposed upon himself compelled him to a severe self-restraint; the style also of the drama, which is in prose, is austerely simple and strong. Yet there is at the same time a curious and undisguised modern note about this work, and we feel throughout the presence of that spirit which gives life to Ibsen’s plays of to-day. The strong, passionate figure of Hjördis fills most of the field, however finely the lesser figures are moulded. She is the Brunhild of the ancient story, yet she is the same woman who is the heroine and the hero of all Ibsen’s social dramas; a strong and passionate woman, instinct with suppressed energy to which the natural outlets have been closed, and which is transformed into volcanic outbreaks of disaster. “A woman, a woman,” she says to Dagny, who is shocked at a remark about using the armour and weapons of a man, and mixing among men, “there is no one who knows what a woman can do.” Her father having been slain, she is brought as a young girl into the conqueror’s household. She finds a temporary satisfaction in the exercise of her physical strength. When the mild and honourable warrior Sigurd comes with his feeble friend Gunnar, both fall in love with her, and she, without speaking it, returns Sigurd’s love. She promises to give herself to him who can perform the greatest feat of strength, and Sigurd, by a ruse, wins her for his friend Gunnar, himself taking to wife the gentle Dagny. Henceforth there is something strange and incalculable in all the deeds of Hjördis, and a concentrated bitterness in her words. When afterwards she learns that Sigurd had once loved her, the proud and reserved woman offers in vain to put on helmet and breastplate and to follow him through the earth. “I have been homeless in the world from the day that you took another to wife. Ill was that deed of yours. All good gifts may a man give to his trothful friend,--all, but not the woman he holds dear. When he does that deed, he breaks the thread that the Norns have spun, and wastes two lives.” Hjördis is the woman of the social dramas, but it has not yet occurred to her that she has a life of her own.

“Emperor and Galilean,”[10] although historical and written in prose, is very unlike “Hærmændene paa Helgeland”; it belongs, indeed, in date as well as in character, almost as much to the second group. It is made up of two five-act dramas, presenting a series of brilliant and powerful scenes in the life of the Emperor Julian, lacking, however, dramatic unity and culminating interest. It is probable that the disconnected character of the work, and its undue length, is owing to the long period which intervened between its commencement in Norway and its completion at Rome. It is, in its parts, undoubtedly a fascinating work; we trace Julian’s life from his youth as a student of philosophy to his death as Emperor conquered by the Galilean. The interest of his life lies in his various relations to the growing Christianity and decaying Paganism by which he is surrounded. Julian realizes the possibility of a third religion--“the reconciliation between nature and spirit, the return to nature through spirit: that is the task for humanity.” But he imagines that he is himself the divine representative of this new religion. His friend Maximus prophesies at the end “The third kingdom shall come! The spirit of man shall take its inheritance once more.” Julian failed because he was weak and vain, and because the age was against him; he dies with the cry on his lips, “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”

[10] It may be noted that this was the first of Ibsen’s dramas to be translated into English, by Miss Catherine Ray, in 1876. To Mr. Gosse belongs the honour of having first introduced Ibsen to English readers, in an article in the “Fortnightly,” in 1874. The first of his social dramas to be translated into English was “The Doll’s House” (under the title of “Nora”), by Miss Frances Lord in 1882.

“Love’s Comedy,” the earliest of the poems of the second group, is the first work in which Ibsen’s characteristic modern tone appears, not again to vanish. It is a satire on the various conventional phases of love, exquisite in form but comparatively slight in texture. In “Brand” Ibsen produced a poem which for imagination and sombre energy stands alone. It is perhaps the most widely known of all his works; in Germany it has already found four translators, and there is reason to hope that before long a translation will appear in England. “Brand” is the tragedy of will and self-sacrifice in the service of the ideal--a narrow ideal, but less narrow, Ibsen seems sometimes to hint, than the ideals of most of us. The motto on which Brand acts in all the crises of his life is, “All or nothing;” and with him it means in every case the crushing of some human emotion or relationship for the fulfilment of a religious duty. Soon after the commencement of the poem Brand became the pastor of a gloomy little northern valley, between mountains and glaciers, into which the sun seldom penetrates. He is accompanied by his wife Agnes, a pathetic image of love and devotion. A child is born to them, but soon dies in this sun-forsaken valley. There are few passages in literature of more penetrating pathos than the scene in the fourth act in which, one Christmas eve, the first anniversary of the child’s death, Brand persuades Agnes to give her Alf’s clothes--the last loved relics--to a beggar-woman who comes to the door with her child during a snowstorm. Soon Agnes also dies. In the end, stoned by his flock, Brand makes his way, bleeding, up into the mountains. Here, amid the wild rocks and his own hallucinations, he is met by a mad girl who mistakes him for the thorn-crowned Christ. This scene, in which, overwhelmed at last by an avalanche, Brand dies amid his broken ideals, attains an imaginative height not elsewhere reached in modern literature, and for the like of which we have to look back to the great scene on the heath in “Lear.” Here and elsewhere, however, Ibsen brings in supernatural voices, which scarcely heighten the natural grandeur of the scene, and which seem out of place altogether in a poem so entirely modern. “Brand” brings before us a wealth of figures and of discussions, carried on in brief, clear, musical, though irregular, metrical form, and it would be impossible to analyze so complex a work within moderate compass.

“Peer Gynt,” is regarded in his own country as Ibsen’s most important achievement, for it is a great modern national epic, the Scandinavian “Faust.” A successful attempt has even been made to represent it on the stage, the incidental music being composed by Grieg. The name of its hero and many incidents in his career have their home in old Norwegian folk-lore, and Ibsen has himself declared that Peer Gynt is intended as the representative of the Norwegian people. Peer is the child of imagination who lives in a world in which fantasy and reality can scarcely be distinguished. He is an egoist with colossal ambitions; at the same time he is by no means wanting in worldly wisdom; he goes to America, and makes a large fortune (later on suddenly lost) by the importation of slaves and the exportation of idols to China, a trade which he reconciles to his conscience by opening up another branch of business for supplying missionaries (at a considerable profit) with Bibles and rum. The whole is a series of scenes and adventures, often fantastic or symbolic in character, always touched by that profound irony which is Ibsen’s most marked feature. One scene is so original and penetrative that it stands alone in literature. It is that scene of peculiarly Norwegian essence in which Peer Gynt enters the hut in which his mother lies dying, with the fire on the hearth and the old tom-cat on a stool at the bottom of the bed. He talks to her in the tone of the days of childhood, reminding her how they used to play at driving to the fairy-tale castle of Soria Moria. He sits at the foot of the bed, throws a string round the stool on which the cat lies, takes a stick in his hand, imagines a journey to Heaven--the altercation with St. Peter at the gate, the deep bass voice of God declaring that Mother Aase shall enter free--and lulls her to death with the stories with which she had once lulled him to sleep. At a much later date in his career Peer finds himself in a madhouse at Cairo, where he is assured that his own guiding principle of the self-sufficiency of the individual, without regard for the actions or opinions of others, is carried out to its extreme limits. He is here acclaimed as emperor and crowned with a garland of straw. Thus are his dreams of power fulfilled. In the end he returns, a white-haired old man, to be eagerly welcomed by the faithful Solveig, whom, as a girl, he had forsaken, and who is now an old woman, still waiting for him with the kingdom of love that he had missed. The poem ends with the picture of Solveig singing over her lover a cradle-song of death. The failure of an over-mastering imagination and weak will to attain the love that alone satisfies, that is the last lesson of this marvellous work, so full of manifold meaning.

It is certainly by the third and latest group--the Social Dramas--that Ibsen has attracted most attention both in his own country and abroad. They are all written in mature life, and he has here devoted his early acquired mastery of the technical requirements of the drama, as well as the later acquired experiences of men, to a keen criticism of the social life of to-day. He himself, it is said, regards these plays as his chief title to remembrance. It is scarcely possible to say so much as this when we think of “Hærmændene paa Helgeland,” of “Brand,” and of “Peer Gynt.” But it certainly does not befit us of to-day to complain that Ibsen has devoted his most mature art to work which has a significance which to-day at all events cannot be over-estimated. That significance may be very easily set forth; the spirit that works through Ibsen’s latest dramas is the same that may be detected in his earliest, “Catilina;” it is an eager insistance that the social environment shall not cramp the reasonable freedom of the individual, together with a passionately intense hatred of all those conventional lies which are commonly regarded as “the pillars of society.” But this impulse that underlies nearly all Ibsen’s dramas of the last group is always under the control of a great dramatic artist. The dialogue is brief and incisive; every word tells, and none is superfluous; there is no brilliant play of dialogue for its own sake. “The illusion I wish to produce,” he has himself said, “is that of truth itself, I want to produce upon the reader the impression that what he is reading is actually taking place before him.” In the hands of a meaner artist such an attempt would be fatal; to Ibsen it has brought greater strength. If there is fault to find in the construction of Ibsen’s prose dramas, it lies in their richness of material; the subsidiary episodes are frequently dramas in themselves, although duly subordinate to the main purpose of the play. The care lavished on the development and episodes of these dramas is equalled by the reality and variety of the persons presented. These are never mere embodied “humours” or sarcastic caricatures; the terrible keenness of Ibsen’s irony comes of the simple truth and moderation with which he describes these social humbugs who are yet so eminently reasonable and like ourselves. Every figure brought before us, even the most insignificant, is an organic and complex personality, to be recognized without trick or catchword.

“The Young Men’s League,” the earliest of the series, deals with the rise and progress of one Stensgaard. He is a man whose character is essentially vulgar and commonplace, but who is undoubtedly clever, and whose ambition it is to gain political success. At the same time he is short-sighted, conceited, absolutely wanting in tact. He is even unstable, save in the great central aim of his life, which he seeks to bring about by the formation of a compact majority of voters, of which the nucleus is the Young Men’s League. Stensgaard is always at his best as an orator; he is a Numa Roumestan, genial, almost childishly open-hearted, with a flow of facile emotion and a great mastery of phrases. We leave him under a cloud of contempt but nowise defeated; and we are given to understand that he is on his way to the highest offices of state. In this vivid and skilful portrait of the representative leader of semi-democratized societies, Ibsen has given his chief utterance on current political methods. It is scarcely favourable. He realizes that government by party mobs, each headed by a Stensgaard--a phase in the progress towards complete democratization illustrated in England to-day--is by no means altogether satisfactory. “A party,” remarks Dr. Stockmann, in “An Enemy of Society,” “is like a sausage-machine: it grinds all the heads together in one mash.” Something more fundamental even than party government is needed, and in some words written in 1870 Ibsen has briefly expressed what he conceives to be the pith of the matter:--

“The coming time--how all our notions will fall into the dust then! And truly it is high time. All that we have lived on up till now has been the remnants of the revolutionary dishes of the last century, and we have been long enough chewing these over and over again. Our ideas demand a new substance and a new interpretation. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are no longer the same things that they were in the days of the blessed guillotine; but it is just this that the politicians will not understand, and that is why I hate them. These people only desire partial revolutions, revolutions in externals, in politics. But these are mere trifles. There is only one thing that avails--to revolutionize people’s minds.”