Max Simon Nordau

IBSENISM.

In the course of the last two centuries the whole civilized world has, with greater or less unanimity, repeatedly recognised a sort of intellectual royalty in some contemporary, to whom it has rendered homage as the first and greatest among living authors. For a great part of the eighteenth century Voltaire, ‘le roi Voltaire,’ was the ‘poet laureate’ of all civilized nations. During the first third of the present century this position was held by Goethe. After his death the throne remained vacant for a score of years, when Victor Hugo ascended it amidst the enthusiastic acclamations of the Latin and Slavonic races, and with a feeble opposition from those of Teutonic origin, to hold it until the end of his life.

At the present time voices have for some years been heard in all countries claiming for Henrik Ibsen the highest intellectual honours at the disposal of mankind. It is wished that the Norwegian dramatist should, in his old age, be recognised as the world-poet of the closing century. It is true that only a part of the multitude and of the critical representatives of its taste acclaims him; but the fact that it has entered anyone’s mind at all to see in him a claimant for the throne of poetry makes a minute examination of his titles to the position necessary.

That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power is not for a moment to be denied. He is extraordinarily emotive, and has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and impressive manner that which has excited his feelings. (We shall see that these are almost always feelings of hatred and rage, i.e., of displeasure.) A natural capacity drew him towards the stage—a capacity for imagining situations in which the characters are forced to turn inside out their inmost nature; in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds, and modes of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible to the senses, but potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature and in words. Like Richard Wagner, he knows how to group events into living frescoes possessing the charm of significant pictures; with this difference, however, that Ibsen works, not like Wagner, with strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating vision into the backgrounds of souls and the conditions of humanity. Fairy-lore is not lacking in Ibsen either, but he does not allow the imagination of the spectators to run riot in mere spectacles; he forces them into moods, and binds them by his spell in circles of ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.

His strong desire to embody the thought occupying his mind in a single picture, which can be surveyed at one view, also dictated to him the set form of his drama—a form not invented, but largely perfected, by him. His pieces are, as it were, final words terminating long anterior developments. They are the sudden breaking into flame of combustible materials accumulating during years, it may be during whole human lives, or even generations, and of which the sudden flare brilliantly illumines a wide extent of time and space. The incidents of the Ibsen drama more frequently take place in a day, or at most in twice twenty-four hours, and in this short space of time there are concentred all the effects of the course of the world and of social institutions on certain characters, in such a conspectus that the destinies of the dramatis personÆ become clear to us from the moment of their first appearance. The Doll’s House, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, The Pillars of Society, and Hedda Gabler comprise about twenty-four hours; An Enemy of Society, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea, about thirty-six hours. It is the return to the Aristotelian doctrine of the unities of time and space with an orthodoxy compared with which the French classicists of the age of Louis XIV. are heretics. I might well term the Ibsenite technique a technique of fireworks, for it consists in preparing long in advance a staging on which the suns, Roman candles, squibs, fireballs and concluding fire-sheaves are carefully placed in proper position. When all is ready the curtain rises, and the artistically-constructed work begins to crackle, explosion following explosion uninterruptedly with thunder and lightning. This technique is certainly very effective, but hardly true. In reality events rarely lead up to a catastrophe so brilliant and succinct. In Nature all is slowly prepared, and unrolls itself gradually, and the results of human deeds covering years of time do not compress themselves into a few hours. Nature does not work epigrammatically. She cannot trouble herself about Aristotelian unities, for she has always an infinity of affairs of her own in progress at one and the same time. As a matter of handicraft, one is certainly often forced to admire the cleverness with which Ibsen guides and knots the threads of his plot. Sometimes the labour is more successful than at other times, but it always implies a great expenditure of textile skill. Whoever sets most store on truth in a poem—that is, on the natural action of the laws of life—will often enough bring away from Ibsen’s dramas an impression of improbability, and of toilsome and subtle lucubrations.

The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time, which may be said to be the poetic counterpart of the painter’s artifice (difficult, but for the most part barren) of foreshortening in space. Each of the terse words which suffice him has something of the nature of a peep-hole, through which limitless vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples and all ages have few situations at once so perfectly simple and so irresistibly affecting as the scenes—to cite only a few—where Nora is playing with her children,[318] where Dr. Rank relates that he is doomed to imminent death by his inexorable disease,[319] where Frau Alving with horror discerns his dissolute father[320] in her only son, where the housekeeper, Frau Helseth, sees Rosmer and Rebecca die in each other’s arms,[321] etc.

Similarly, it must be acknowledged that Ibsen has created some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare. Gina (in The Wild Duck) is one of the most profound creations of world-literature—almost as great as Sancho Panza, who inspired it. Ibsen has had the daring to create a female Sancho, and in his temerity has come very near to Cervantes, whom no one has equalled. If Gina is not quite so overpowering as Sancho, it is because there is wanting in her his contrast to Don Quixote. Her Don Quixote, Hjalmar, is no genuine, convinced idealist, but merely a miserable self-deluding burlesquer of the ideal. None the less, no poet since the illustrious Spanish master has succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain, jolly, healthy common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety as to things eternal, and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, obvious duties, without a suspicion of higher moral obligations, as this Gina, e.g., in the scene where Hjalmar returns home after having spent the night out.[322] Hjalmar also is a perfect creation, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the cogent temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entrancingly that ‘self-restraint’ in every word which, as Goethe said, ‘reveals the master.’ Little Hedwig (again in The Wild Duck), the aunt Juliane Tesman (in Hedda Gabler), perhaps also the childishly egoistical consumptive Lyngstrand (in The Lady from the Sea), are not inferior to these characters. It should, however, be noticed that, with the exception of Gina, Hjalmar and Hedwig, the lifelike and artistically delightful persons in Ibsen’s dramas never play the chief parts, but move in subordinate tasks around the central figures. The latter are not human beings of flesh and blood, but abstractions such as are evoked by a morbidly-excited brain. They are attempts at the embodiment of Ibsenite doctrines, homunculi, originating not from natural procreation, but through the black art of the poet. This is even admitted, although reluctantly and with reservation, by one of his most raving panegyrists, the French professor, Auguste Ehrhard.[323] Doubtless Ibsen takes immense pains to rouge and powder into a semblance of life the talking puppets who are to represent his notions. He appends to them all sorts of little peculiarities for the purpose of giving them an individual physiognomy. But this perpetually recurring imbecile ‘Eh?’ of Tesman[324] (in Hedda Gabler), this ‘dash it all!’ and stealthy nibbling of sweetmeats by Nora[325] (in A Doll’s House), this ‘smoking a large meerschaum’ and champagne-drinking of Oswald (in Ghosts), do not delude the attentive observer as to their being anything but automata. In spite of the poet’s artifices, one sees, behind the thin varnish of flesh-colour, the hinges and joints of the mechanism, and hears, above the tones of the phonographs concealed in them, the creaking and grating of the machinery.

I have endeavoured to do justice to the high poetical endowment of Ibsen, and shall sometimes be able in the course of this inquiry to recognise this gift again. Is it this, however, which alone or chiefly has gained for him his admirers in all lands? Do his retinue of fifers and bagpipers prize him for his homely emotional scenes, and for his truly lifelike accessory figures? No. They glorify something else in him. They discover in his pieces world-pictures of the greatest truth, the happiest poetic use of scientific methods, clearness and incisiveness of ideas, a fiercely revolutionary desire for freedom, and a modernity pregnant with the future. Now we will test and examine these affirmations seriatim, and see if they can be supported by Ibsen’s works, or are merely the arbitrary and undemonstrable expressions of Æsthetic wind-bags.

It is pretended that Ibsen is before all things exemplary in truthfulness. He has even become the model of ‘realism.’ As a matter of fact, since Alexandre Dumas pÈre, author of The Three Musketeers and Monte Cristo, no writer has heaped up in his works so many startling improbabilities as Ibsen. (I say improbabilities, because I dare not say impossibilities; for, after all, everything is possible as the unheard-of exploit of some fool, or as the extraordinary effect of a unique accident.) Is it conceivable that (in Ghosts) the joiner Engstrand, wishing to open a tavern for sailors, should call upon his own daughter to be the odalisque of his ‘establishment’—this daughter who reminds him that she has been ‘brought up in the house of Madam Alving, widow of a lord-in-waiting,’ that she has been treated ‘almost as a child of the house’? Not that I imagine Engstrand to be possessed of any moral scruples. But a man of this stamp knows that one woman does not suffice for his house; and since he must engage others, he would certainly not turn to his daughter, bred as she was in the midst of higher habits of life, and knowing that, if she wishes to lead a life of pleasure, it would not be necessary to become straightway a prostitute for sailors. Is it conceivable that Pastor Manders (Ghosts), a liberally educated clergyman in the Norway of to-day, a country of flourishing insurance companies, banks, railways, prosperous newspapers, etc., should dissuade Madam Alving from insuring against fire the asylum she had just founded? ‘For my own part,’ he says, ‘I should not see the smallest impropriety in guarding against all contingencies.... I mean [by really responsible people] men in such independent and influential positions that one cannot help allowing some weight to their opinions.... People would be only too ready to interpret our action as a sign that neither you nor I had the right faith in a Higher Providence.’ Does Ibsen really wish to make anyone believe that in Norway there are persons who have religious scruples concerning insurance against fire? Has not this nonsensical idea come into his head simply because he wishes to have the asylum burned down and finally destroyed? For this purpose Madam Alving must have no money to rebuild the asylum, it must not be insured, and hence Ibsen thought it necessary to assign a motive for the omission of the insurance. A poet who introduces a fire into his work, as a symbol and also as an active agent—for it has the dramatic purpose of destroying the lying reputation for charity of the defunct sinner Alving—should also have the courage to leave unexplained the omission of the insurance, strange as it may seem. Oswald Alving relates to his mother (Ghosts) that a Paris doctor on examining him had told him he had a ‘kind of softening of the brain.’ Now, I appeal to all the doctors of the world if they have ever said plainly to a patient, ‘You have softening of the brain.’ To the family it perhaps may be revealed, to the patient never. Chiefly because, if the diagnosis be correct, the invalid would not understand the remark, and would certainly no longer be in a fit state to go alone to the doctor. But for yet another reason these words are impossible. In any case, Oswald’s disease could not have been a softening, but a hardening, a callous, sclerotic condition of the brain.

In A Doll’s House Helmer, who is depicted as somewhat sensual, although prosaic, homely, practical, and commonplace, says to his Nora: ‘Is that my lark who is twittering outside there?... Is the little squirrel running about?... Has my little spendthrift bird been wasting more money?... Come, come; my lark must not let her wings droop immediately.... What do people call the bird who always spends everything?... My lark is the dearest little thing in the world; but she needs a very great deal of money.... And I couldn’t wish you to be anything but exactly what you are—my own true little lark....’ And it is thus that a husband, a bank director and barrister, after eight years of married life, speaks to his wife, the mother of his three children; and not in a momentary outburst of playful affection, but in the full light of an ordinary day, and in an interminable scene of seven pages (pp. 2-8), with a view to giving us an idea of the habitually prevalent tone in this ‘doll’s home!’ I should much like to know what my readers of both sexes who have been married at least eight years think of this specimen of Ibsen’s ‘realism.’

In The Pillars of Society all the characters talk about ‘society.’ ‘You are to rise and support society, brother-in-law,’ says Miss Hessel, ‘earnestly and with emphasis.’ ‘If you strike this blow, you ruin me utterly, and not only me, but also a great and blessed future for the community which was the home of your childhood.’ And a little further on: ‘See, this I have dared for the good of the community!... Don’t you see that it is society itself that forces us into these subterfuges?’ The persons thus holding forth are a wholesale merchant and consul, and a school-mistress who has long resided in America, and has broad views. Can the word ‘society’ in the mouth of cultivated people, when so used, have any other meaning than ‘social edifice?’ Well, but the characters in the piece, as it is again and again repeated, employ the word ‘society’ in reference to the well-to-do classes in a small seaside place in Norway—that is, to a clique of six or eight families! Ibsen makes the readers of his piece believe that it is a question of upholding the social edifice, and they learn with astonishment that this only concerns the protection of a diminutive coterie of Philistines in a northern Gotham.

The American ship Indian Girl is undergoing repairs in Consul Bernick’s dock. Her hull is quite rotten. If she is sent to sea she will assuredly founder. Bernick, however, insists that she shall sail in two days. His foreman Aune pronounces this impossible. Then Bernick threatens Aune with dismissal, at which the latter yields, and promises that ‘in two days the Indian Girl will be ready to sail.’ Bernick knows that he is sending the Indian Girl’s crew of eighteen men to certain death. And why does he commit this wholesale murder? He gives the following explanation: ‘I have my reasons for hurrying on the affair. Have you read this morning’s paper? Ah! then you know that the Americans have been making disturbances again. The shameless pack put the whole town topsy-turvy. Not a night passes without fights in the taverns or on the street, not to speak of other abominations.... And who gets the blame for all this disturbance? It is I—yes, I—that suffer for it. These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping at us for giving our whole attention to the Palm Tree. And I, whose mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t do for me to have my name bespattered in this way.... Not just now; precisely at this moment I need all the respect and good-will of my fellow-citizens. I have a great undertaking on hand, as you have probably heard; but if evil-disposed persons succeed in shaking people’s unqualified confidence in me, it may involve me in the greatest difficulties. So I must silence these carping and spiteful scribblers at any price, and that is why I give you till the day after to-morrow.’ This paltry motive for the coldly-planned murder of eighteen men is so ridiculous that even Ehrhard, who admires everything in Ibsen, dares not defend it, and timidly remarks that ‘the author does not very well explain why the anxiety for his reputation should require the sending to sea of a vessel which he has not had time thoroughly to repair.’[326]

At the head of a delegation of his fellow-citizens, sent to thank him for the establishment of a railway, Pastor RÖrlund delivers an address to Bernick in which the following passages occur: ‘We have often expressed to you our gratitude for the broad moral foundation upon which you have, so to speak, built up our society. This time we chiefly hail in you the ... citizen, who has taken the initiative in an undertaking which, we are credibly assured, will give a powerful impetus to the temporal prosperity and well-being of the community.... You are in an eminent sense the pillar and corner-stone of this community.... And it is just this light of disinterestedness shining over all your actions that is so unspeakably beneficent, especially in these times. You are now on the point of procuring for us—I do not hesitate to say the word plainly and prosaically—a railway.... But you cannot reject a slight token of your grateful fellow-citizens’ appreciation, least of all on this momentous occasion, when, according to the assurances of practical men, we are standing on the threshold of a new era.’ I have not interrupted by a single remark or note of exclamation this unheard-of balderdash. It shall produce its own unaided effect upon the reader. If this nonsense appeared in a burlesque farce, it would be hardly funny enough, but otherwise acceptable. Now, this claims to be ‘realistic’! We are to take Ibsen’s word for it that Pastor RÖrlund was sober when he made this speech! A more insulting demand has never been made by an author on his readers.

In An Enemy of Society the subject treats of a rather incomprehensible bathing establishment, comprising at once mineral waters, medicinal baths and sea-bathing. The doctor of the establishment has discovered that the springs are contaminated with typhoid bacilli, and insists that the water shall be taken from a place higher up in the mountains, where it would not be polluted by sewage. He is the more urgent in his demands, as without this precaution a fatal epidemic will break out among the visitors. And to this the burgomaster of the town is supposed to reply: ‘The existing supply of water for the baths is once for all a fact, and must naturally be treated as such. But probably the directors, at some future time, will not be indisposed to take into their consideration whether, by making certain pecuniary sacrifices, it may not be possible to introduce some improvements.’ This is a question of a place which, as Ibsen insists, has staked its future on the development of its youthful bathing establishment; the place is situated in Norway, in a small district where all the inhabitants are mutually acquainted, and where every case of illness and death is noticed by all. And the burgomaster will run the risk of having a number of the visitors at the establishment attacked with typhoid, when he is forewarned that this will certainly happen if the conduit pipes of the spring are not transferred. Without having an exaggeratedly high opinion of the burgomaster mind in general, I deny that any idiot such as Ibsen depicts is at the head of the local administration of any town whatsoever in Europe.

Tesman, in Hedda Gabler, expects that his publication, Domestic Industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages, will secure him a professorship in a college. But he has a dangerous competitor in Ejlert LÖvborg, who has published a book on The General March of Civilization. This work has already made a ‘great sensation,’ but the sequel is far to surpass this, and ‘treats of the future.’ ‘But, good gracious! we don’t know anything about that!’ someone objects. ‘No; but there are several things though can be said about it, all the same.... It is divided into two sections. The first is about the civilizing forces of the future, and the other is about the civilizing progress of the future.’ Special stress is laid upon the fact that it lies wholly outside the domain of science, and consists in mere prophecy. ‘Do you believe it impossible to reproduce such a work—that it cannot be written a second time? No.... For the inspiration, you know....’ We are acquainted, were it only through popular histories of morals such as the Democritus of Karl Julius Weber, with the strange questions with which the casuists of the Middle Ages used to occupy themselves. But that, in our century, such works as those of Tesman and LÖvborg could gain for their authors a professorship of any kind in either hemisphere, or even the position of privat docent, is an infantile invention, fit to raise a laugh in all academical circles.

In The Lady from the Sea the mysterious sailor returns to find that his old sweetheart has been for some years the wife of Dr. Wangel. He urges her to follow him, saying she really belongs to him. The husband is present at the interview. He shows the stranger that he is wrong in wishing to carry off Ellida. He represents to the sailor that it would be preferable if he addressed himself to him (the husband), and not to the wife. He mildly remonstrates with the stranger for addressing Ellida with the familiar ‘thou,’ and calling her by her Christian name. ‘Such a familiarity is not customary with us, sir.’ The scene is unspeakably comic, and would be worthy of reproduction in its entirety. We will limit ourselves to quoting the conclusion:—

Stranger. To-morrow night I will come again, and then I shall look for you here. You must wait for me here in the garden, for I prefer settling the matter with you alone. You understand?

Ellida (in low, trembling tone). Do you hear that, Wangel?

Wangel. Only keep calm. We shall know how to prevent this visit.

Stranger. Good-bye for the present, Ellida. So to-morrow night——

Ellida (imploringly). Oh, no, no! Do not come to-morrow night! Never come here again!

Stranger. And should you, then, have a mind to follow me over seas?

Ellida. Oh, don’t look at me like that!

Stranger. I only mean that you must then be ready to set out.

Wangel. Go up to the house, Ellida, etc.

And Ibsen depicts Wangel, not as a senile, debile old man, but in the prime of life and in full possession of all his faculties!

All these crack-brained episodes are, however, far surpassed by the scene in Rosmersholm, where Rebecca confesses to the doughty Rosmer that she is consumed by ardent passion for him:—

Rosmer. What have you felt? Speak so that I can understand you.

Rebecca. It came over me—this wild, uncontrollable desire—oh, Rosmer!

Rosmer. Desire? You! For what?

Rebecca. For you.

Rosmer (tries to spring up). What is this? [Idiot!]

Rebecca (stops him). Sit still, dear; there is more to tell.

Rosmer. And you mean to say—that you love me—in that way?

Rebecca. I thought that it should be called love. Yes, I thought it was love; but it was not. It was what I said. It was a wild, uncontrollable desire.... It came upon me like a storm on the sea. It was like one of the storms we sometimes have in the North in the winter-time. It seizes you—and sweeps you along with it—whither it will. Resistance is out of the question.’

Rosmer, the object of this burning passion, is forty-three years old, and has been a clergyman. This makes it somewhat droll, but not impossible, for erotomaniacs can love all sorts of creatures, even boots.[327] What, however, is inconceivable is the way in which the nymphomaniac sets about satisfying her ‘wild, uncontrollable desire,’ this ‘storm upon the sea’ which ‘seizes you, and sweeps you along with it.’ She had become the friend of Rosmer’s sickly wife, and had for eighteen months tormented her by hinting that Rosmer is unhappy because she has no children, that he loves her, the nymphomaniac, but has controlled his passion as long as his wife is living. By means of this poison, patiently and unceasingly dropped into her soul, she had happily driven her to suicide. After a year and a half! To appease her ‘wild, uncontrollable passion’! This is exactly as if a man driven wild by hunger should, with a view to satisfying his craving, devise a deep plan for obtaining a field by fraud, so that he might grow wheat, have it ground, and afterwards bake himself a splendid loaf, which would then be Oh, so delicious! The reader may judge for himself if this is the usual way in which famished persons, or nymphomaniacs over whom passion ‘sweeps like a storm upon the sea,’ satisfy their impulses.

Such are the presentations of the world’s realities as figured to himself by this ‘realist’! Many of his infantile or silly lucubrations are petty, superficial details, and a benevolent friend, with some experience of life and some common-sense, could easily have preserved him in advance from making himself ridiculous. Others of his inventions, however, touch the very essence of his poems and convert these into out and out grotesque moonshine. In The Pillars of Society, Bernick, the man who calmly plans the murder of eighteen men to maintain his reputation as a capable dock-owner (we may remark, in passing, the absurdity of this means for attaining such an end), all at once confesses to his fellow-citizens, without any compulsion, and solely on the advice of Miss Hessel, that he has been a villain and a criminal. In A Doll’s House, the wife, who was only a moment before playing so tenderly with her children, suddenly abandons these children without a thought for them.[328] In Rosmersholm we are to believe that the nymphomaniac Rebecca, while in constant intercourse with the object of her flame, has become chaste and virtuous, etc. Many of Ibsen’s principal characters present this spectacle of impossible and incomprehensible metamorphoses, so that they look like figures composed of odd halves, which some bungling artisan has stuck together.

After the lifelike truthfulness of Ibsen, let us inquire into the scientific character of his work. This reminds us of the civilization of Liberian negroes. The constitution and laws of that West African republic read very much like those of the United States of North America, and on paper command our respect. But anyone living in Liberia very soon recognises the fact that these black republicans are savages, having no idea of the political institutions nominally existing among them, of their code of laws, etc. Ibsen likes to give himself the appearance of standing in the domain of natural science and of profiting by its latest results. In his plays Darwin is quoted. He has evidently dipped, though with a careless hand, into books on heredity, and has picked up something about medical science. But the scanty, ludicrously misunderstood stock phrases which have remained in his memory are made use of by him much as my illustrative Liberian negro uses the respectable paper collars and top-hats of Europe. The expert can never preserve his gravity when Ibsen displays his scientific and medical knowledge.

Heredity is his hobby-horse, which he mounts in every one of his pieces. There is not a single trait in his personages, a single peculiarity of character, a single disease, that he does not trace to heredity. In A Doll’s House, Dr. Rank’s ‘poor innocent spine must do penance for “his” father’s notions of amusement when he was a lieutenant in the army.’ Helmer explains to Nora that ‘a misty atmosphere of lying brings contagion into the whole family. Every breath the children draw contains some germ of evil.... Nearly all men who go to ruin early have had untruthful mothers.... In most cases it comes from the mother; but the father naturally works in the same direction.’ And again: ‘Your father’s low principles you have inherited, every one of them. No religion, no morality, no sense of duty.’ In Ghosts Oswald has learned from the extraordinary doctor in Paris who told him he had softening of the brain, that he had inherited his malady from his father.[329] Regina, the natural daughter of the late Alving, exactly resembles her mother.

Regina (to herself). So mother was that kind of woman, after all.

Mrs. Alving. Your mother had many good qualities, Regina.

Regina. Yes; but she was one of that sort, all the same. Oh! I’ve often suspected it.... A poor girl must make the best of her young days.... And I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving.

Mrs. Alving. Yes, I see you do. But don’t throw yourself away, Regina.

Regina. Oh! what must be, must be. If Oswald takes after his father, I take after my mother, I dare say.

In Rosmersholm Rebecca’s nymphomania is explained by the fact that she is the natural daughter of a Lapland woman of doubtful morals. ‘I believe your whole conduct is determined by your origin,’ Rector Kroll says to her (p. 82). Rosmer never laughs, because ‘it is a trait of his family.’ He is ‘the descendant of the men that look down on us from these walls’ (p. 80). His ‘spirit is deeply rooted in his ancestry’ (p. 80). Hilda, the stepdaughter of the ‘Lady from the Sea,’ says: ‘I should not wonder if some fine day she went mad.... Her mother went mad, too. She died mad. I know that.’ In The Wild Duck nearly everyone has a hereditary mark. Gregers Werle, the malignant imbecile, who holds and proclaims his passion for gossip as an ardent desire for truth, inherits this craze from his mother.[330] Little Hedwig becomes blind, like her father, old Werle.[331]

In the earlier philosophical dramas the same idea is constantly repeated. Brand gets his obstinacy, and Peer Gynt his lively, extravagant imagination, from the mother. Ibsen has evidently read Lucas’s book on the first principles of heredity, and has borrowed from it uncritically. It is true that Lucas believes in the inheritance even of notions and feelings as complex and as nearly related to specific facts as, e.g., the horror of doctors,[332] and that he does not doubt the transmission of diseased deviations from the norm, e.g., the appearance of blindness at a definite age.[333] Lucas, however, whose merits are not to be denied, did not sufficiently distinguish between that which the individual receives in its material genesis from its parents, and that which is subsequently suggested by family life and example, by continuous existence in the same conditions as its parents, etc. Ibsen is the true ‘man of one book.’ He abides by his Lucas. If he had read Weismann,[334] and, above all, Galton,[335] he would have known that nothing is more obscure and apparently more capricious, than the course of heredity. For the individual is, says Galton, the result—the arithmetic mean—of three different quantities: its father, its mother and the whole species, represented by the double series, going back to the beginnings of all terrestrial life, of its paternal and maternal progenitors. This third datum is the unknown quantity—the x—in the problem. Reversions to distant ancestors may make the individual wholly unlike its parents, and the influence of the species so far exceed, as a general rule, those of the immediate progenitors that children who are the exact cast of their father or mother, especially with respect to the most complex manifestations of personality, of character, capacities and inclinations, are the greatest rarities. But Ibsen is not at all concerned about seriously justifying his ideas on heredity in a scientific manner. As we shall see later on, these ideas have their root in his mysticism; Lucas’s work was for him only a lucky treasure-trove, which he seized on with joy, because it offered him the possibility of scientifically cloaking his mystic obsession.

Ibsen’s excursions in the domain of medical science, which he hardly ever denies himself, are most delightful. In The Pillars of Society Rector RÖrlund glorifies the women of his cÔterie as a kind of ‘sisters of mercy who pick lint.’ Pick lint! In an age of antiseptics and aseptics! Let Ibsen only take into his head to enter any surgical ward with his ‘picked lint’! He would be astonished at the reception given to him and his lint. In An Enemy of Society Dr. Stockmann declares that the water of the baths with its ‘millions of bacilli is absolutely injurious to health, whether used internally or externally.’ The only bacilli which can be referred to in this scene, as throughout the whole piece, are the typhoid bacilli of Eberth. Now, it may be true that bathing in contaminated water may produce Biskra boils, and perhaps bÉri-bÉri; but it would be difficult for Dr. Stockmann and Ibsen to instance a single case of typhoid fever contracted through bathing in water containing bacilli. In A Doll’s House Helmer’s life ‘depended on a journey abroad.’ That might be true for a European in the tropics, or for anyone living in a fever-district. But in Norway there is no such thing as an acute illness in which the life of the invalid depends on ‘a journey abroad.’ Further on Dr. Rank says (p. 60): ‘In the last few days I have had a general stock-taking of my inner man. Bankruptcy! Before a month is over I shall be food for worms in the churchyard.... There is only one more investigation to be made, and when I have made it I shall know exactly at what time dissolution will take place.’ According to his own declaration, Dr. Rank suffers from disease of the dorsal marrow (it is true that he speaks of the dorsal column, but the mistaken expression need not be taken too rigidly). Ibsen is evidently thinking of consumption of the spinal marrow. Now, there is in this disease absolutely no symptom which could with certainty authorize the prediction of death three weeks beforehand; there is no ‘general stock-taking of the inner man’ which the invalid, if he were a doctor, could carry out on himself to gain a clear knowledge of ‘when the dissolution’ was to take place; and there is no form of consumption of the spinal marrow which would allow the invalid four weeks before his death (not an accidental death, but one necessitated by his disease) to go to a ball, drink immoderately of champagne, and afterwards to take an affecting leave of his friends. Oswald Alving’s illness in Ghosts is, from a clinical standpoint, quite as childishly depicted as that of Rank. From all that is said in the piece the disease inherited by Oswald from his father can only be diagnosed either as syphilis hereditaria tarda, or dementia paralytica. The first of these diseases is out of the question, for Oswald is depicted as a model of manly strength and health.[336] And even if, in exceptional and extremely rare cases, the malady does not show itself till after the victim is well on in his twenties, it yet betrays itself from the earliest childhood by certain phenomena of degeneracy which would prevent even a mother, blinded by love and pride, from glorifying her son’s ‘outer self’ in the style of Mrs. Alving. Certain minor features might perhaps indicate dementia paralytica, as, for example, Oswald’s sensual excitability, the artless freedom with which he speaks before his mother of the amours of his friends in Paris, or gives expression to his pleasure at the sight of the ‘glorious’ Regina, the levity with which, at the first sight of this girl, he makes plans for his marriage, etc.[337] But together with these exact, though subordinate, features there appear others infinitely more important, which wholly preclude the diagnosis of dementia paralytica. There is in Oswald no trace of the megalomania which is never absent in the first stage of this malady; he is anxious and depressed, while the sufferer from general paralysis feels extremely happy, and sees life through rose-coloured spectacles. Oswald forebodes and dreads an outburst of madness—a fact which I, for my part, have never observed in a paralytic, nor found indicated by any clinicist whatever. Finally, Oswald’s dementia declares itself with a suddenness and completeness found in acute mania only; but the description given of Oswald in the last scene—his immobility, his ‘dull and toneless’ voice, and his idiotic murmuring of the words ‘the sun, the sun,’ repeated half a dozen times—does not in the remotest degree correspond with the picture of acute mania.

The poet has naturally no need to understand anything of pathology. But when he pretends to describe real life, he ought to be honest. He should not get out of his depth in scientific observation and precision simply because these are demanded or preferred by the age. The more ignorant the poet is in pathology, the greater is the test of his veracity given by his clinical pictures. As he cannot, in his lay capacity, draw on his imagination for them by combining clinical experiences and reminiscences of books, it is necessary that he shall have seen with his own eyes each case represented to depict it accurately. Shakespeare was likewise no physician; and, besides, what did the physicians of his time know? Yet we can to this day still diagnose without hesitation the dementia senilis of Lear, Hamlet’s weakness of will through nervous exhaustion (neurasthenic ‘aboalie’), the melancholia, accompanied with optical hallucination, of Lady Macbeth. Why? Because Shakespeare introduced into his creations things really seen. Ibsen, on the contrary, has freely invented his invalids, and that this method could, in the hands of a layman, only lead to laughable results, needs no proof. A moving or affecting situation offers itself to his imagination—that of a man who clearly foresees his near and inevitable death, and with violent self-conquest lifts himself to the stoic philosophy of renunciation; or that of a young man who adjures his mother to kill him when the madness he awaits with horror shall break out. The situation is very improbable. Perhaps it has never occurred. In any event, Ibsen has never witnessed it. But if it occurred it would possess great poetic beauty, and produce a great effect on the stage. Consequently Ibsen calmly turns out the novel and unknown maladies of a Dr. Rank or an Oswald Alving, the progress of which might make these situations possible. Such is the procedure of the poet whose realism and accurate observation are so much vaunted by his admirers.

His clearness of mind, his love of liberty, his modernity! Careful readers of Ibsen’s works will not trust their eyes when they see these words applied to him. We will at once put immediate and exhaustive tests to the clearness of his thought. His love of liberty will be revealed by analysis as anarchism; and his modernity amounts essentially to this, that in his pieces railways are constructed (The Pillars of Society), that there is a cackle about bacilli (An Enemy of the People), that the struggles of political parties play a part in them (The League of the Young, Rosmersholm)—all put on superficially with a brush, without inner dependence upon the true active forces in the poem. This ‘modern,’ this ‘apostle of liberty,’ has an idea of the press and its functions fit for a clerk in a police-station, and he pursues journalists with the hatred, droll in these days, of a tracker of demagogues in the third decade of this century. All the journalists whom he sets before us—and they are numerous in his pieces, Peter Mortensgaard in Rosmersholm, Haustad and Billing in An Enemy of the People, Bahlmann in The League of the Young—are either drunken ragamuffins or poor knock-kneed starvelings, constantly trembling at the prospect of being thrashed or kicked out, or unprincipled rascals who write for anyone who pays. He has so clear a grasp of the social question that he makes a foreman mix with the workmen and threaten a strike because machines are about to be used on the wharves (The Pillars of Society)! He looks upon the masses with the fine contempt of the great feudal landlords. When he mentions them it is either with biting derision or a most aristocratic and arrogant disdain.[338]

The greater part of his notions, moreover, belong to no time, but are emanations from his personal perversity, and can, therefore, be neither modern or not modern; the least uncouth of them, however, having their root in a definite period, spring from the circle of ideas of a Gothamist of the first third of the present century. The label ‘modern’ was arbitrarily attached to Ibsen by George Brandes (Moderne Geister, Frankfurt, 1886), one of the most repulsive literary phenomena of the century. George Brandes, a sponger on the fame or name of others, has throughout his life followed the calling of a ‘human orchestra,’ who with head, mouth, hands, elbows, knees, and feet, plays ten noisy instruments at once, dancing before poets and authors, and, after the hubbub, passes his hat round among the deafened public. For a quarter of a century he has assiduously courted the favour of all who for any reason had a following, and written rhetorical and sophistical phrases about them, as long as he could find a market. Adorned with a few feathers plucked from the stately pinions of Taine’s genius, and prating of John Stuart Mill, whose treatise On Liberty he has glanced at, but hardly read, and certainly not understood, he introduced himself among the youth of Scandinavia, and, abusing their confidence, obtained by this means, has made their systematic moral poisoning the task of his life. He preached to them the gospel of passion, and, with truly diabolical zeal and obstinacy, confused all their notions, giving to whatever he extolled that was mean and reprehensible the most attractive and honourable names. It has always been thought weak and cowardly to yield to base impulses condemned by judgment, instead of combating and stifling them. If Brandes had said to the young, ‘Renounce your judgment! Sacrifice duty to your passions! Be ruled by your senses! Let your will and consciousness be as feathers before the storm of your appetites!’—the better among his hearers would have spit at him. But he said to them: ‘To obey one’s senses is to have character. He who allows himself to be guided by his passions has individuality. The man of strong will despises discipline and duty, and follows every caprice, every temptation, every movement of his stomach or his other organs’; and these vulgarities, thus presented, no longer had the repulsive character which awakens distrust and serves as a warning. Proclaimed under the names of ‘liberty’ and ‘moral autonomy,’ debauchery and dissoluteness gain easy admission into the best circles, and depravity, from which all would turn if it appeared as such, seems to insufficiently informed minds attractive and desirable when disguised as ‘modernity.’ It is comprehensible that an educator who turns the schoolroom into a tavern and a brothel should have success and a crowd of followers. He certainly runs the risk of being slain by the parents, if they come to know what he is teaching their children; but the pupils will hardly complain, and will be eager to attend the lessons of so agreeable a teacher. By a similar method Brandes acquitted himself of his educational functions. This is the explanation of the influence he gained over the youth of his country, such as his writings, with their emptiness of thought and unending tattle, would certainly never have procured for him.

Brandes discovered in Ibsen a revolt against the prevailing moral law, together with a glorification of bestial instincts, and accordingly trumpeted his praises in spite of his astounding reactionary views, as a ‘modern spirit,’ recommending Ibsen’s works, with a wink of the eye, to the knowledge-craving youth, whom he served as maÎtre de plaisir. But this ‘modern,’ this ‘realist,’ with his exact ‘scientific’ observation, is in reality a mystic and an ego-maniacal anarchist. An analysis of his intellectual peculiarities will enable us to discern a resemblance to those of Richard Wagner, which is not surprising, since a similarity in features is precisely a stigma of degeneracy, and for this reason is common to many, or to all, higher degenerates.

Ibsen is the child of a rigorously religious race, and grew up in a family of believers. The impressions of childhood have determined the course of his life. His mind has never been able to iron out the theological crease it got through nurture. The Bible and Catechism became for him the bounds beyond which he has never passed. His free-thinking diatribes against established Christianity (Brand, Rosmersholm, etc.), his derision of the shackled pietism of divines (Manders in Ghosts, RÖrlund in The Pillars of Society, the dean in Brand), are an echo of his teacher, the theosophist, Soeren Kierkegaard (1815-55), a zealot certainly for quite another Christianity than that ordained by the state, and provided with powers of nomination and fixed salaries, but nevertheless an austere and exclusive Christianity, demanding the whole being of man. Perhaps even Ibsen looks upon himself as a free-thinker. Wagner did the same. But what does that prove? He is not clear with regard to his own thought.

‘It is curious,’ writes Herbert Spencer,[339] ‘how commonly men continue to hold, in fact, doctrines which they have rejected in name, retaining the substance after they have abandoned the form. In theology an illustration is supplied by Carlyle, who, in his student days, giving up, as he thought, the creed of his fathers, rejected its shell only, keeping the contents, and was proved by his conceptions of the world, and man and conduct, to be still among the sternest of Scotch Calvinists.’ If Spencer, when he wrote this, had known Ibsen, he would perhaps have cited him as a second example. As Carlyle was always a Scotch Calvinist, so Ibsen has always remained a Norwegian Protestant of the school of Kierkegaard—that is to say, a Protestant with the earnest mysticism of a Jacob Boehme, a Swedenborg, or a Pusey, which easily passes over into the Catholicism of a St. Theresa or a Ruysbroek.

Three fundamental ideas of Christianity are ever present in his mind, and about these as round so many axes revolves the entire activity of his poetical imagination. These three unalterable central ideas, constituting genuine obsessions, reaching up from the unconscious into his intellectual life, are original sin, confession and self-sacrifice or redemption.

Æsthetic chatterers have spoken of the idea of heredity influencing all Ibsen’s works, an idea which cannot escape even the feeblest attention, as something appertaining to modern science and Darwinism. As a matter of fact, it is the ever-recurring original sin of St. Augustine, and it betrays its theological nature, firstly by the circumstance that it makes its appearance in conjunction with the two other theological ideas of confession and redemption, and secondly, by the distinguishing characteristic of hereditary transmission. As we have above seen, Ibsen’s personages always inherit a disease (blindness, consumption of the spinal marrow, madness), a vice (mendaciousness, levity, lewdness, obduracy), or some defect (incapacity for enjoyment), but never an agreeable or useful quality. Now what is good and wholesome is just as frequently inherited as what is evil and diseased—even more frequently, according to many investigators. Hence if Ibsen had really wished to exhibit the operation of the law of heredity as understood by Darwin, he would have offered us at least one example, if only one, of the inheritance of good qualities. But not a single instance is to be met with in all his dramas. What his beings possess of good, comes one knows not whence. They have always inherited nothing but evil. The gentle Hedvig in The Wild Duck becomes blind like her father, Werle. But from whom does she get her dreamy wealth of imagination, her devoted loving heart? Her father is a cold egoist, and her mother a clever, practical, prosaic housewife. Thus she can never have inherited her fine qualities from either of her parents. From them she receives only her eye-disease. With Ibsen heredity is only a visitation, a punishment for the sins of the fathers; science knows of no such exclusive heredity; theology alone knows it, and it is simply original sin.

Ibsen’s second theological motif is confession; in nearly all his pieces such is the goal to which all the action tends; not, perchance, forced by circumstances upon a dissimulating offender, not the inevitable revelation of a hidden misdeed, but the voluntary outpouring of a pent-up soul, the voluptuous, self-tormenting disclosure of an ugly inner wound, the remorseful ‘My guilt, my deepest guilt!’ of the sinner breaking down under the weight of his burdened conscience, humbling himself to an avowal that he may find inward peace; in short, genuine confession as required by the Church. In A Doll’s House, Helmer informs his wife (p. 44): ‘Many a man can lift himself up again morally if he openly recognises his offence and undergoes its punishment.... Only just think how a man so conscious of guilt as that must go about everywhere lying, and a hypocrite, and an actor; how he must wear a mask towards his neighbour, and even his wife and children.’ For him not the guilt, but the dissimulation, is the great evil, and its true expiation consists in ‘public avowal’—i.e., in confession. In the same piece Mrs. Linden, without any external necessity, and simply in obedience to an inner impulse, makes the following confession (p. 87): ‘I, too, have suffered shipwreck.... I had no choice at the time’; while later on she develops the theory of confession once more (p. 90): ‘Helmer must know everything; between those two there must be the completest possible understanding, and that can never come to pass while all these excuses and concealments are going on.’

In The Pillars of Society Miss Hessel exacts a confession in these terms (p. 70):

Here you are, the first man in the town, living in wealth and pride, in power and honour—you who have set the brand of crime upon an innocent man.

Bernick. Do you think I do not feel deeply how I have wronged him? Do you think I am not prepared to make atonement?

Lona. How? By speaking out?

Bernick. Can you ask such a thing?

Lona. What else can atone for such a wrong?

And Johan also says (p. 75):

Bernick actually makes the confession demanded of him from pure contrition, for at the time he makes it all proofs of his crime are destroyed, and he has nothing more to fear from other persons. His confession is couched in most edifying terms (p. 108):

I must begin by rejecting the panegyric with which you ... have overwhelmed me. I do not deserve it; for until to-day I have not been disinterested in my dealings.... I have no right to this homage; for ... my intention was to retain the whole myself.... My fellow-citizens must know me to the core ... that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum open for instruction.... My fellow-citizens, I will come out of the lie; it had almost poisoned every fibre of my being. You shall know all. Fifteen years ago I was the guilty one, etc.

In Rosmersholm there is hardly any other subject treated of than the confession of all before all. In the very first visit of Kroll (p. 15) Rebecca urges Rosmer to confess:

As he does not at once obey she will speak for him (p. 19):

Rosmer soon does it himself (p. 28):

(We may here note the purely theological designation given to Rosmer’s act.)

Rosmer. I feel so relieved now it is over. You see, I am quite calm Rebecca....

Like Rosmer, Rebecca also confesses to Rector Kroll (p. 86):

No, not yet all. But she hastens to complete to Rosmer the confession begun to Kroll (p. 98):

In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida (p. 19) confesses to Arnholm the story of her insensate betrothal with the foreign sailor. Arnholm so little comprehends the need of this confession, made without rhyme or reason, that he asks with astonishment: ‘What is your object, then, in telling me that you were bound?’ ‘Because I must have someone in whom to confide,’ is Ellida’s sole—and, moreover, sufficient—answer.

In Hedda Gabler the inevitable confessions take place before the commencement of the piece. ‘Yes, Hedda,’ LÖvborg says (p. 123). ‘And when I used to confess to you! Told you about myself—things that nobody else knew in those days. Sat there and admitted that I had been out on the loose for whole days and nights.... Ah, Hedda, what power was it in you that forced me to acknowledge things like that?... Had not you an idea that you could wash me clean if only I came to you in confession?’ He confesses in order to receive absolution.

In The Wild Duck confession is equally prominent, but it is deliciously ridiculed. The scene in which Gina confesses to her husband her early liaison with Werle is one of the most exquisite things in contemporary drama (Act IV.).

Further on the idea of self-deliverance and purification through confession is pitilessly travestied.

On his way to the guillotine, Avinain, the French assassin, condensed the experience of his life in the pithy saying, ‘Never confess.’ But this is advice which only those of strong will and healthy minds can follow. A lively idea vehemently demands to be transformed into movement. The movement exacting the least effort is that of the small muscles of the larynx, tongue, and lips, i.e., the organs of speech. Anyone, therefore, having a specially lively idea experiences a strong desire to relax those cell-groups of his brain in which this idea is elaborated by allowing the transmission of their stimulus to the organs of speech. In a word, he desires to speak out. And if he is weak, if the inhibitive power of the will is not greater than the motor impulse proceeding from the ideational centre, he will burst out into speech, be the consequences what they may. That this psychological law has always been known is proved by all literature, from the fable of King Midas to Dostojewski’s Raskolnikow; and the Catholic Church furnished one more proof of her profound knowledge of human nature which she transformed the primitive Christian custom of confession before the assembled congregation, which was to be a self-humiliation and expiation, into auricular confession, which serves the purpose of a safe and blissful alleviation and relaxation, and constitutes for ordinary men a primary psychic need of the first order. It was this sort of confession which Ibsen, probably unconsciously, had in view. (‘Because I must have someone in whom I can confide,’ as Ellida says.) Himself a degenerate, Ibsen can picture to himself only the intellectual life of degenerates, in whom the mechanism of inhibition is always disordered, and who, therefore, cannot escape from the impulse to confess, when anything of an absorbing or exciting character exists in their consciousness.

The third and most important theological obsession of Ibsen is the saving act of Christ, the redemption of the guilty by a voluntary acceptance of their guilt. This devolution of sin upon a lamb of sacrifice occupies the same position in Ibsen’s drama as in Richard Wagner’s. The motif of the sacrificial lamb and of redemption is constantly present in his mind, certainly not always clear and comprehensible, but, conformably with the confusion of his thought, diversely distorted, obscured, and, so to speak, in contrapuntal inversion. Now Ibsen’s personages voluntarily and joyfully bear the cross, in keeping with the Christ-idea; now it is put upon their shoulders by force or artifice, which is, as theologians would say, a diabolical mockery of this idea; now the sacrifice for another is sincere, now mere hypocrisy; the effects Ibsen draws from the incessantly recurring motif are, agreeably with its form, now moral and affecting, now comically base and repulsive.

In The Pillars of Society there is a talk of some ‘scandal’ which occurred years before the commencement of the piece. The husband of the actress Dorf, on returning home one evening, found her with a stranger, who, on his entrance, sprang out of the window. The affair caused great excitement and indignation in the Norwegian Gotham. Immediately afterwards Johan TÖnnesen fled to America. Everyone looked upon him as the ‘culprit.’ In reality, however, it was his brother-in-law, Bernick. Johan had voluntarily incurred the blame of Bernick’s fault. On his return from America the sinner and the sacrificial lamb discuss the circumstance (p. 45):

Here the idea of the sacrificial lamb is normal and rational. But it is soon afterwards introduced into the same piece in a distorted shape. Bernick sends the rotten-keeled Indian Girl to sea, to her certain destruction, in spite of his foreman Aune’s opposition. While, however, planning this wholesale murder, he also schemes for laying the burden of his crime on the innocent Aune (p. 65):

In Ghosts the idea of the lamb of sacrifice is equally travestied. The asylum founded by Mrs. Alving has been burnt. The joiner, Engstrand, that theatrical villain, succeeds in persuading the idiotic pastor, Manders, that he—Manders—was the cause of the fire. And as the pastor is made desperate by the possible legal consequences, Engstrand goes to him and says (p. 184):

In A Doll’s House the idea develops itself with great beauty. Nora confidently expects that her husband, on hearing of her forgery, will assume the blame, and she is resolved not to accept his sacrifice (p. 76):

In the deepest excitement she looks for the expected miracle, the renewal of Christ’s act of salvation in the narrow circumstances of a small village—‘I am the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.’ And, since the miracle does not come to pass, there takes place the immense transformation in her nature which forms the real subject of the piece. Nora explains this to her husband with the greatest clearness (p. 116):

...The thought never once occurred to me that you could allow yourself to submit to the conditions of such a man. I was so firmly convinced that you would say to him, ‘Pray make the affair known to all the world’; and when that had been done ... then you would, as I firmly believed, stand before the world, take everything upon yourself, and say, ‘I am the guilty person.’ ... That was the miracle that I hoped and feared. And it was to hinder that that I wanted to put an end to my life.

In The Wild Duck the idea of the sacrificial lamb recurs no less than three times, and is the moving force of the whole piece. The infringement of the forest laws, of which the elder Ekdal was convicted, was not committed by him, but by Werle:

Werle thus shuffles his fault on Ekdal, and the latter breaks down under the weight of the cross. Afterwards, when Hjalmar learns that little Hedwig is not his child, and disowns her, the idiot Gregers Werle goes to the despairing maiden, and says:

Here, then, Hedwig is not to offer herself in sacrifice, but a pet animal, thus abasing the idea from Christianity to paganism. Finally, it crops up a third time. At the last moment Hedwig cannot make up her mind to kill the duck, and prefers turning the pistol against her own breast, thus purchasing with her own life that of the bird. This dismal dÉnouement is worrying and foolish, because useless; the poetical effect would have been fully attained if Hedwig, instead of dying, had only slightly wounded herself; for in this way she would have furnished equally strong proof that she was seriously determined to bear witness to her love for her father by the sacrifice of her young life, and to restore peace between him and her mother. But Æsthetic criticism is not my function; I willingly yield that to phrase-makers. All that I have to indicate is the triple recurrence in The Wild Duck of the idea of the sacrificial lamb.

At its third appearance this idea suffers a significant transformation. Hedwig sacrifices herself, not in expiation of an offence—for she is ignorant of her mother’s guilt—but to accomplish a work of love. Here the mystico-theological element of redemption recedes into the background so far as to be almost imperceptible, and there remains hardly more than the purely human element of the joy felt in self-sacrifice for others—an impulse not rare among good women, and which is a manifestation of the unsatisfied yearning for maternity (often unknown to themselves), and at the same time one of the noblest and holiest forms of altruism. Ibsen shows this impulse in many of his female characters, the source of which in the religious mysticism of the poet would not be at once noticed, if from the numerous other conjugations of the root-idea of the sacrificial lamb we had not already acquired the sure habit of recognising it even in its obscurations. Hedwig constitutes a transition from the theological to the purely human form of voluntary self-sacrifice. The over-strung child carries renunciation to the orthodox extreme of yielding up her life; Ibsen’s other women, to whose character Hedwig supplies the key, go only to the point of lovingly active self-denial. They do not die for others, but they live for others. In A Doll’s House Mrs. Linden has this hunger for self-sacrifice.

Here the idea is not so disguised as to be unrecognisable. Krogstad is a culprit and an outlaw. If Mrs. Linden offers to live for him, it is certainly chiefly from the instinct of maternity. But in this natural feeling there is also a tinge of the mystic idea of the sinner’s redemption through disinterested love. In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida wishes to return to her birthplace on the sea, Skjoldvik, because she believes there is nothing for her to do in Wangel’s house. At the announcement of her resolution her stepdaughter, Hilda, evinces a profound despair. Then for the first time Ellida learns that Hilda loves her; there is then born in her the thought that she has someone to live for, and she says dreamily: ‘Oh, if there should be something for me to do here!’ In Rosmersholm Rebecca says to Kroll (p. 8):

In The Pillars of Society there are two of these touching self-sacrificing souls—Miss Martha Bernick and Miss Hessel. Miss Bernick has reared the illegitimate child Dina, and has consecrated her own life to her (p. 52):

She loves Johan, but as she sees that he is attracted by Dina she unites the two. She explains herself in regard to the incident in an exceedingly affecting scene with Johan’s half-sister (p. 95):

In Hedda Gabler it is Miss Tesman, aunt of the imbecile Tesman, who plays the pathetic part of the sacrificial mother. She has brought him up, and when he marries gives him the largest part of her modest income. ‘Oh, aunt,’ bleats the poor idiot (p. 18), ‘you will never be tired of sacrificing yourself for me!’ ‘Do you think,’ replies the good creature, ‘I have any other joy in this world than to smooth the way for you, my dear boy—you who have never had a father or a mother to look after you?’ And when subsequently the paralytic sister of Miss Tesman is dead, Hedda and she hold this conversation (p. 196):

The three Christo-dogmatic obsessions of original sin, confession, and self-sacrifice, filling Ibsen’s dramas, as we have seen, from the first line to the last, are not the only tokens of his mysticism. This betrays itself by a whole series of other peculiarities, which shall be briefly indicated.

At the head of these stands the astoundingly chaotic nature of his thought. One cannot believe one’s eyes while reading how his fulsome flatterers have had the audacity to extol him for the ‘clearness’ and ‘precision’ of his thought. Do these individuals, then, imagine that no one capable of forming a judgment will ever read a line of Ibsen? A clearly-defined thought is an extraordinary rarity in this Norwegian dramatist. Everything floats and undulates, nebulous and amorphous, such as we are accustomed to see in weak-brained degenerates. And if he once succeeds, with toil and stress, in grasping anything and expressing it in a moderately intelligible manner, he unfailingly hastens, a few pages later, or in a subsequent piece, to say the exact opposite. A talk is made of Ibsen’s ‘ideas on morality’ and of his ‘philosophy.’ He has not formulated a single proposition on morality, a single conception of the world and life, that he has not himself either refuted or fittingly ridiculed.

He seems to preach free love, and his eulogy of a licentiousness unchecked by any self-control, regardless of contracts, laws, and morality, has made of him a ‘modern spirit’ in the eyes of Georg Brandes and similar protectors of those ‘youths who wish to amuse themselves a little.’ Mrs. Alving (Ghosts, p. 158), calls a ‘crime’ the act of Pastor Manders in repulsing her, after she has quitted her husband and thrown herself on the pastor’s neck. This highly-strung dame pushes Regina into the arms of Oswald, her son, when in shameless speech he informs her that it would give him pleasure to possess the girl. And this very same Mrs. Alving speaks in terms of the deepest indignation of her dead husband as ‘profligate’ (p. 146), and again designates him in the presence of her son as a ‘broken-down man’ (in the original it is ‘et forfaldent Menneske,’ an epithet usually bestowed on fallen women), and why? Because he had had wanton relations with women! Well, but is it in Ibsen’s opinion permissible, or not permissible, to gratify carnal lust as often as it is awakened? If it is permissible, how does Mrs. Alving come to speak with scorn of her husband? If it is not permissible, how dared she offer herself to Pastor Manders, and be the procuress between Regina and her own half-brother? Or does the moral law hold good for man only, and not for woman? An English proverb says, ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’ Ibsen evidently does not share the opinion of popular lore. A woman who runs away from her legal husband and pursues a lover (Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert LÖvborg, in Hedda Gabler), or who offers to form an illicit connection with a man, although nothing prevents their marrying without further ado like other rational ratepayers (Mrs. Linden and Krogstad in A Doll’s House)—such women have Ibsen’s entire approbation and sympathy. But if a man seduces a maiden and liberally provides for her subsequent maintenance (Werle and Gina in The Wild Duck), or, again, if he has illicit relations with a married woman (Consul Bernick and the actress Dorf in The Pillars of Society), then it is so heinous a crime that the culprit remains branded his whole life, and is nailed by the poet to the pillory with the cruelty of a mediÆval executioner.

The same contradiction finds its expression in another and more general form. At one time Ibsen contends with ferocious, impetuosity that everyone is ‘a law unto himself’ alone, i.e., that he should obey every one of his caprices, nay, even of his diseased impulsions; that, as his commentators idiotically put it, he should (sich auslebe) ‘live out his life.’ In The Pillars of Society Miss Bernick says to Dina (p. 94):

In Rosmersholm, Rosmer says admiringly of the scoundrel Brendel (p. 28): ‘At least he has had the courage to live his life his own way. I don’t think that’s such a small matter after all.’ In the same piece Rebecca complains (p. 97): ‘Rosmersholm has broken me.... Broken me utterly and hopelessly. I had a fresh, undaunted will when I came here. Now I have bent my neck under a strange law.’ And further on (p. 102): ‘It is the Rosmer view of life ... that has infected my will.... and made it sick, enslaved it to laws that had no power over me before.’ Ejlert LÖvborg laments in like fashion in Hedda Gabler. ‘But it is this—that I don’t want to live that kind of life either. Not now, over again. It is the courage of life and the defiance of life that she’ (Thea Elvested, with her sweet, loving constraint) ‘has snapped in me.’ Quite in opposition to these views, Ibsen, in his Ghosts, makes Regina proclaim her ‘right to live out her life’ in these words (p. 189): ‘Oh! I really can’t stop out here in the country and wear myself out nursing sick people ... a poor girl must make the best of her young days.... I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving.’ Mrs. Alving replies: ‘Alas! yes.’ This ‘alas’ is bewildering. Alas? Why ‘alas’? Does she not obey her ‘law’ if she satisfies her ‘joy in living,’ and, as she forthwith explains, enters the house of ill-fame for sailors set up by the joiner Engstrand? How can Mrs. Alving utter this ‘alas,’ when she also was ‘obeying her law’ in offering herself as the mistress of Pastor Manders, and since she wished to aid her son in ‘obeying his law,’ when he had set his eyes on Regina? It is because Ibsen, in his lucid moments, feels that there may be something of danger in ‘obeying one’s law,’ and this ‘alas’ of Mrs. Alving escapes him as a confession. In The Wild Duck he ridicules his own dogma in the most liberal style. In that piece there is one Molvig, a candidate for a University degree, who also ‘obeys his law.’ This law prescribes that he shall learn nothing, evade his examinations, and pass his nights in taverns. The scoffer, Relling, asserts (p. 317) that it ‘comes over him like a sort of possession; and then I have to go out on the loose with him. Molvig is a demoniac, you see, ... and demoniac natures are not made to walk straight through the world; they must meander now and then. And in order that there shall be no doubt as to what Relling means by this, he subsequently explains (p. 361): ‘“What the devil do you mean by demoniac?” “It’s only a piece of hocus-pocus I’ve invented to keep up a spark of life in him. But for that the poor harmless creature would have succumbed to self-contempt and despair many a long year ago.”’

That is true. Molvig is a pitiable weakling, unable to conquer his indolence and passion for drink; abandoned to his own devices, he would recognise himself for the miserable creature he is, and despise himself as profoundly as he deserves; but Relling arrives on the scene, and gives his lack of character the title ‘demoniac,’ and now ‘the child has a fine name,’ which Molvig can make a parade of to himself and others. Ibsen does exactly the same thing as his Relling. The weakness of will, incapable of resisting base and pitiable instincts, he praises as the ‘will to live out one’s life,’ as the ‘freedom of a spirit who obeys his own law only,’ and recommends it as the sole rule of life. But, unlike Relling, he is for the most part ignorant of the fact that he is practising a deception (which I by no means regard in Relling’s light as pious and charitable), and believes in his own humbug. That is, for the most part; not always. Here and there, as in The Wild Duck, he recognises his error and scourges it severely; and his inmost feeling is so little influenced by his self-deceptive phrase, fit for a weak-willed degenerate, that he involuntarily and unconsciously betrays, in all his productions, his deep abhorrence of men who ‘obey their own law in order to live out their life.’ He punishes Chamberlain Alving in his son, and makes him cursed by his widow because he has ‘lived out his life.’ He imputes it as a crime to Consul Bernick and the merchant Werle that they have ‘lived out their life,’ the former in sacrificing his brother-in-law Johan to protect himself, and for his intrigue with Mrs. Dorf, the actress; and the latter for allowing Ekdal to bear the blame of his fault, and for seducing Gina. He surrounds with an aureole the glorified heads of Rosmer and Rebecca, because they did not ‘live out their life,’ but, on the contrary, ‘died their death,’ if I may put it so; because they obeyed, not ‘their own law,’ but that of others, the universal moral law that annihilated them. Whenever one of his characters acts in accordance with Ibsen’s doctrine, and does what is agreeable to himself regardless of morals and law, he experiences such contrition and self-torment that he is unable to find calm and joy until he has disburdened his conscience by confession and expiation.

‘This living out one’s life’ makes its appearance in Ibsen in the form also of a rigid individualism. The ‘self’ is the only real thing; the ‘I’ must be cherished and developed, as, indeed, BarrÈs preaches independently of Ibsen. The first duty of every human being is to be just to his ‘I,’ to satisfy its demands, to sacrifice to it every consideration for others. When Nora wishes to abandon her husband, he cries (p. 112):

In Ghosts Oswald says to his mother with triumphant brutality (p. 192): ‘I can’t be much taken up with other people. I have enough to do thinking about myself.’ How in the same piece Regina emphasizes her ‘I’ and its rights, we have already seen. In An Enemy of the People, Stockmann proclaims the right of the ‘I’ in face of the majority, and even the race, in these words (p. 283): ‘It is a hideous lie: the doctrine that the multitude, the vulgar herd, the masses, are the pith of the people—that, indeed, they are the people—that the common man, that this ignorant, undeveloped member of society, has the same right to condemn or to sanction, to govern and to rule, as the few people of intellectual power.’ And (p. 312): ‘I only want to drive into the heads of these curs that the Liberals are the worst foes of free men ... that the considerations of expediency turn morality and righteousness upside down until life is simply hideous.... Now I am one of the strongest men upon earth.... You see the fact is that the strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone.’ But this very Stockmann, who will hear nothing of ‘the multitude, the vulgar herd, the masses,’ as he reiterates with insufferable tautology, who feels, his ‘I’ powerful only in a majestic solitude, calls his fellow-citizens ‘old women who think only of their families,[340] and not of the general good.’ And in the very same piece (A Doll’s House), in which Ibsen evidently bestows loud applause on Nora for declaring that ‘her only duties were to herself,’ and that she ‘could have no consideration for anyone else,’ he stigmatizes her husband as a pitiable, low-spirited weakling, because on his wife’s confession of forgery he first of all thinks of his own reputation only, and hence of his ‘duty to himself,’ his only consideration being for himself, and not for his wife. Here there recurs the same phenomenon as in Ibsen’s notions concerning sexual morality. Unchastity in a man is a crime, but in a woman is permissible. In the same way the rude emphasizing of the ‘I’ is a merit only in the woman. The man has no right to be an egoist. How, for example, Ibsen rails at egoism through Bernick (in The Pillars of Society), whom he makes say naÏvely, in reference to his sister Martha, that she ‘is quite insignificant’ (p. 49), and that he does not wish to have her otherwise!

And how severely Ibsen condemns the egoism of Mrs. Elvsted’s husband (Hedda Gabler), when he puts these bitter words into her mouth (p. 52): ‘He is not really fond of anybody but himself. Perhaps of the children a little!’

But the most remarkable thing about this philosopher of individualism is that he not only expressly condemns egoism in the man as a low vice, but unconsciously also admires disinterestedness in the woman as an angelic perfection. In A Doll’s House (p. 113) he brags that ‘my most sacred duties are towards myself.’ And yet the only touching and charming characters in his pieces with whom this inflexible individualist is successful are the saintly women who live and die for others only—these Hedwigs, Miss Bernicks, Miss Hessels, Aunt Tesmans, etc., who never think of their ‘I,’ but make the sacrifice of all their impulses and wishes to the welfare of others their sole task on earth. This contradiction, violent to the point of absurdity, is very well explained by the nature of Ibsen’s mind. His mystico-religious obsession of voluntary self-sacrifice for others is necessarily stronger than his pseudo-philosophic lucubration on individualism.

Among the ‘moral ideas’ of Ibsen are counted his professed thirst for truth. At least enough has been said and written on this subject. ‘Only just think,’ Helmer says to Nora (A Doll’s House, pp. 44, 45), ‘how a man so conscious of guilt as that must go about everywhere lying, and a hypocrite, and an actor; how he must wear a mask towards his neighbour, and even his wife and children, his own children. That’s the worst, Nora.... Because such a misty atmosphere of lying brings contagion into the whole family.’ ‘Is there no voice in your mother’s heart that forbids you to destroy your son’s ideals?’ asks Pastor Manders in Ghosts (p. 155), when Mrs. Alving has revealed to her son her defunct husband’s ‘immorality.’ To which Mrs. Alving magniloquently replies, ‘But what about the truth?’ In The Pillars of Society, Lona Hessel thus preaches to Consul Bernick (p. 57):

Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen years you have stood upon a lie?

Bernick. A lie?... You call that——

Lona. I call it the lie—the threefold lie. First the lie towards me; then the lie towards Betty; then the lie towards Johan.... Is there not something within you that asks you to get clear of the lie?

Bernick. You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic happiness, and my position in society?

Lona. What right have you to stand where you are standing?

And subsequently (p. 70):

Bernick then examines himself, and shortly before his confession there takes place a highly edifying dialogue between him and the severe guardian of his conscience (p. 98):

In An Enemy of the People, words of truth are ever coming from the mouths of the Stockmann family: ‘There’s so much falseness both at home and at school,’ declaims their daughter, Petra. ‘At home you mustn’t speak, and at school you have to stand there and lie to the children.... We have to teach many and many a thing we don’t believe ourselves.... If only I could afford it I’d start a school myself, and things should be very different there.’ The courageous maiden quarrels with an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity (p. 255): ‘What I am angry with you for is that you have not acted honestly towards my father. You told him it was only the truth and the good of the community you cared about.... You are not the man you pretend to be. And I shall never forgive you—never!’ ‘The whole of our developing social life,’ cries the father Stockmann in his turn (p. 242), ‘is rooted in a lie.’ And later on (p. 287) ‘Yes, I love my native town so well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie.... All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You’ll poison the whole country in time; you’ll bring it to such a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.’ Now, all this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this fervent worship of truth is only one of the forms under which there appears in Ibsen’s consciousness the mystico-religious obsession of the sacrament of confession, and also, if he were not careful, conformably with his habit, to destroy any too hasty belief in the sincerity of his phraseology by himself ridiculing it. In Gregers Werle he has created the best caricature of his men of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly the same terms as Lona Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but in his mouth the words are intended to excite laughter: ‘And look at this confiding nature, this great child,’ he says of his friend Hjalmar (p. 41). ‘See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under the same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his home, as he calls it, rests upon a lie.... At length I see an object in life.’ This object consists in operating on Hjalmar’s moral cataract. And he does it, too. ‘You are sunk in a poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,’ Gregers says to him (p. 101). ‘You have an insidious disease within you, and you’ve sunk down to die in the dark.... Don’t be afraid; I will try to help you up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.’ And shortly afterwards he says to the father: ‘But Hjalmar I can rescue from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to ruin.’ The scoffer Relling treats no worse than he deserves the idiot who, in fulfilling his ‘mission in life’ disturbs the peace between Hjalmar and his wife, destroys their comfortable home, and drives Hedwig to her death.

Now, what is Ibsen’s real opinion? Is a man to strive for truth, or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with Relling? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions, or, rather, he replies to them affirmatively and negatively with equal ardour and equal poetic power.

Another ‘moral idea’ of Ibsen, about which his choristers chatter most loudly, is that of ‘true marriage.’ It is certainly not easy to discover what his mystic brain conceives by these mysterious words, but it is nevertheless possible to guess it from the hundred obscure notions in his plays. He does not seem to approve of the idea that the woman should regard marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In nearly all his pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony peculiar to him. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life’s unhappiness to the fact that she married the chamberlain for his money—that she sold herself. ‘The sums which I have spent upon the orphanage year by year make up the amount—I have reckoned it up precisely—the amount which made Lieutenant Alving a good match in his day.... It was the purchase-money. I do not choose that money should pass into Oswald’s hands’ (p. 149). In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida sings the same song (p. 139): ‘It could bring nothing but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together.... Yes, we are (doing so), or, at least, we suppress the truth. For the truth ... is, that you came out there and bought me.... I was not a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain—sold myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and so absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the bargain when you came and proposed to provide for me all my life.’ In almost the same words Hedda says (Hedda Gabler, p. 86): ‘And then he would go and make such a tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for me. I did not know why I should not accept it.’ She did not know why; but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final suicide, are the consequence of her having allowed herself to be ‘provided for.’ The regard paid to the ‘being provided for’ became also the lifelong misery of another woman in the same piece—Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally as ‘governess in the house of her future husband.’ She subsequently undertook the management of the household. Then she allowed herself to be married, although ‘everything around him is distasteful to me,’ and ‘we do not possess a thought in common.’ Ibsen condemns the man who marries for money not less than the woman who allows herself to be ‘provided for.’ The cause of Bernick’s moral downfall (The Pillars of Society, p. 56), is chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he loved, but another. ‘It was for no new fancy that I broke with you; it was entirely for the sake of the money.’

Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle to which every rational and moral man will subscribe. But why should one marry? The most reasonable answer can only be, ‘From inclination.’ But Ibsen will have none of this either. The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a love-match. It leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (The Lady from the Sea) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly affirms it (p. 108): ‘You had only seen me and spoken to me a few times. Then you wanted me, and so....’ And then she feels herself a stranger to him, and wishes to leave him. So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted, marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the happiness of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundly unhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich, and pays for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel marries a girl because she pleases him, and as a reward she wishes to quit him and her home. What conclusion is to be drawn from all this? That marriage from prudence is bad, and marriage from love no better? That marriage in general is worth nothing, and should be abolished? That would be at least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen arrives. Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case of Nora, it is reciprocal. Something else is still necessary—the man must become the educator of his wife. He must help her intellectually. He must let her participate in all his concerns, make of her a companion possessing equal rights, and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she always remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no ‘true marriage.’ ‘I have no right to claim my husband wholly and solely for myself,’ Ellida confesses (The Lady from the Sea, P. 57). ‘Why, I, too, live in something from which others are shut out.’ In the same piece Wangel blames himself in this way (p. 130): ‘I ought to have been at once a father to her and a guide; I ought to have done my best to develop and enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that.... I preferred her just as she was.’ In The Pillars of Society Mrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141): ‘For many years I believed that I had at one time possessed you and lost you again. Now I know that I have never possessed you.’ And Lona Hessel draws the moral from this story (p. 97):

In Rosmersholm Rector Kroll has treated his wife in the same way; he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully surprised when she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant who has extinguished her mental light (p. 14). ‘My wife, who all her life long has shared my opinions and concurred in my views both in great things and small, is actually inclined to side with the children on many points. And she blames me for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the children. As if it weren’t necessary to. Well, you see how my house is divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it as possible. It’s best to keep such things quiet.’

Upon this point also there may be complete agreement. Most assuredly should marriage be not merely a union of bodies, but also a community of minds; most assuredly should the man help and educate the wife intellectually, although it is to be remarked that this rÔle of teacher and guardian assigned with justice by Ibsen to the man, decisively excludes the full intellectual equality of the two married parties equally claimed by him. But how can one reconcile with these notions about the true relation between the man and his wife Nora’s words to her husband (A Doll’s House, p. 111): ‘I must first try to educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I must set to work alone. And that is why I am going away from you now.... I must be thrown entirely upon myself’? We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have read aright. What, then, is the duty of the husband in ‘true marriage’? Shall he help his wife intellectually? Wangel, Mrs. Bernick, Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it, and repels all assistance. FarÀ da se! She will educate and form herself. As though this contradiction were not already sufficiently bewildering, Ibsen still further mocks those pitiable souls, who would fain obtain rules of morality from him, when, in The Wild Duck, he derides, as he is wont, all that he has preached on the subject of ‘true marriage’ in all the rest of his pieces. In that production a delicious dialogue is brought about between the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer Relling (p. 337):

And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar’s words (p. 345): ‘Well, then, isn’t it exasperating to think that it’s not I, but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage?... Isn’t the marriage between your father and Mrs. Soerby founded upon complete confidence, upon entire and unreserved candour on both sides? They hide nothing from each other. Their relation is based, if I may put it so’ (!) ‘on mutual confession and absolution.’ Hence no one has yet seen a ‘true marriage’; and when by chance this miracle does happen it is fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Soerby—Mr. Werle, who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young girls and sent old friends to prison in his place—Mrs. Soerby, who confides to her husband that she has had illicit relations with every imaginable sort of man. It is a tame imitation of the scene in Raskolnikow by Dostojewski, where the assassin and the prostitute, after a contrite confession, unite their soiled and broken lives; except that in Ibsen the scene is stripped of its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and vulgar.

With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in ‘true marriage,’ their husband suddenly becomes ‘a strange man,’ and, without further ceremony, they abandon their home and their children, some, like Nora, ‘to return to their birthplace,’ where ‘it will be easier for me to get something to do of one sort or another’; others, like Ellida, without giving a thought to what will become of them; others, again, like Mrs. Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover and throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously parodied this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for he assigns the laughable rÔle of the tragic runaway to a man. ‘I must out into the snow and tempest,’ declaims Hjalmar (The Wild Duck, p. 166), ‘and seek from house to house a shelter for my old father and myself.’ And he really goes, but naturally only to return home the next day, crestfallen, but stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need be said against the idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave-taking, which has become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen spared us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar.

We have not yet done with Ibsen’s drivel on the subject of marriage. He seems to exact that no girl should marry before she is fully matured, and possesses an experience of life and a knowledge of the world and of men (A Dolls House, p. 111):

This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going in quest of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the largest possible number of persons, to make a trial, if possible, of a few men before binding herself definitely. A young girl is thoroughly prepared for marriage when she has attained to a respectable age, managed a few households, perhaps also given birth to sundry children, and in this way proved to herself and others that she understands the duties of a housewife and a mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it is the only reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he is here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and rejected as unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental marriage for a longer or shorter period, the preference for brides endowed with a rich experience in love-affairs and sundry children, all this has already existed. Ibsen may learn all that he needs on this subject from his half-compatriot, Professor Westermarck.[341] But he would be no degenerate if he did not regard as progress the return to conditions of the most primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not mistake the far-away past for the future.

Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his dramas. There should be no marriage from interest (Hedda, Mrs. Alving, Bernick, etc.). There should be no marriage from love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage of prudence is not a true marriage. But to marry because each pleases the other is equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida). The man should be the woman’s instructor and educator (Wangel, Bernick). The wife should not allow herself to be instructed and educated by the husband, but acquire the necessary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the wife discovers that her marriage is not a ‘true marriage,’ she leaves the husband, for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her children, for children which she has had by a stranger are naturally strangers also. She must, however, at the same time remain with the husband, and endeavour to transform him from a stranger into her own husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is not intended permanently to unite two beings. When anything in the one is not agreeable to the other, they return the ring and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving, Ellida, Mrs. Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true marriage (Relling). This is Ibsen’s doctrine concerning marriage. It leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It amply suffices for the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian poet’s intellect.

Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering contradictions, Ibsen’s mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable. We have seen in The Lady from the Sea that Ellida wishes to abandon her husband, because her marriage is not a true one, and because her husband has become a stranger to her. Why is he a stranger to her? Because he has married her without mutual close acquaintance. ‘You had only seen me and spoken a few words to me.’ She ought not to have let herself be provided for. ‘Rather the meanest labour, rather the most wretched surroundings, so long as they were the result of free will, of free choice.’ From this one can only reasonably conclude that Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless the woman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has had full freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these conditions existed in the case of the first claimant for her hand. ‘The first—that might have been a complete and real marriage.’ Now, the same Ellida, a few pages before (78), says that she knew absolutely nothing concerning her lover; she did not even know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is spoken of throughout the piece only as ‘the stranger.’

And she betrothed herself to him

So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason that, previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly know him, and she must go to ‘the stranger,’ of whom she knows nothing. Her marriage with Wangel is no marriage, because she did not enter into it with perfect freedom of will, but the marriage with ‘the stranger’ will be ‘perfect and pure,’ although when she betrothed herself to him she had ‘no will of her own.’ After this example of his mental maze, it is truly humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning the intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet of the future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself the labour of referring to his other absurdities.

In this same Lady from the Sea, Ellida renounces her project of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the ‘stranger,’ as soon as Wangel says ‘with aching heart’: ‘Now you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.’ She remains with Wangel. She chooses him. ‘Whence came the change?’ asks Wangel and the reader with him. ‘Ah, don’t you understand,’ Ellida gushingly replies, ‘that the change came—was bound to come—when I could choose in freedom!’ (p. 141). This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete contrast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives her her freedom; but she was still freer on the first occasion, because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not need to begin by setting her free. As little was external coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently after marriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She has come into no property since her marriage, so far as we know from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to explain the change? There is none. It exists in the confused thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself definitively; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy—experimental marriage.

We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. In Ghosts Oswald Alving’s disease is represented as a chastisement for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love. Now, Oswald’s state is the consequence of a complaint which may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know better than that. They know hundreds—nay, thousands—of cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen’s drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be a monster of immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an insane son; and his son could be insane without more culpability on the part of the father than is the case with all men who have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother the intermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of Oswald a panegyric on concubinage—one of the most incredible things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ‘What are they to do?’ replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ‘A poor young artist—a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to get married.’ I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ‘free union,’ and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen’s infantine fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum, very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow to the girl he has persuaded to live with him; and religious marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of the civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something agreeable without undertaking any serious duties; or, finally, in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least, excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love, and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their intention to be faithful to each other unto death.

But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying, and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ‘living out one’s life.’ But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of her husband? That all should remain chaste and pure, an idea worked out by Bjornson in his Glove? No. She is led by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and the law are bad. ‘Oh, that perpetual law and order!’ she exclaims (p. 154); ‘I often think it is that which does all the mischief here in the world.... I can endure all this constraint and cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work my way out to freedom.’ What in the world has Alving’s story to do with ‘law and order?’ and how does ‘freedom’ enter into this Credo? What connection with the piece have the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into applause. In Tahiti neither ‘order’ nor ‘morals’ reign in the sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties have all the ‘freedom’ to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ‘work her way out,’ and the men so ‘live out their lives’ that ships’ officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. And in that very region Chamberlain Alving’s disease is so widespread that, according to Ibsen’s medical theory, all the young Tahitians must be Oswalds.

But this is a constant habit of Ibsen’s, evidenced in all his pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ‘I don’t know what religion is,’ Nora says in the well-known scene where she leaves her husband (p. 114). ‘... I know nothing but what our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true.... I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I thought they were; but I can’t convince myself that they are right.’ Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her father’s name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39): ‘The laws inquire little into motives.’ The whole of this scene, in view of which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play, and does not originally spring from it. If Nora wishes to abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. In The Pillars of Society Bernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces his avowal with the words (p. 110): ‘Let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum,’ etc. ‘Speak for yourself, Bernick, speak for yourself,’ one might well call out to the old wind-bag, who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual case. ‘I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made within the last few days,’ exclaims Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, ‘the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ That may in itself be true; but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato’s republic it might happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general proposition that ‘our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ In Rosmersholm, Brendel says in an obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with foreboding (p. 23): ‘We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.’ This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow in the eye in the place where it occurs, for Rosmersholm has no connection with any definite period of time; and it is not necessary to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas—to any age or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.

We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who wish to pick a quarrel: ‘Sir, why did you look at me in that way?’ ‘Pardon me, I did not look at you.’ ‘What! you say, then, that I lie?’ ‘I said nothing of the sort.’ ‘You give me the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.’ This is Ibsen’s method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead, however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naÏve farces of our fathers. Cleanse Ibsen’s dramas of these pasted-on phrases, and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as ‘modern’ productions; there will remain only a tissue of absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures, not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis—i.e., some anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world without seeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself. In contradiction to the saying of the poet, ‘All that is human is alien to him,’ and his own ‘I’ alone occupies him and absorbs his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem wherein he says, ‘Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day over one’s own self.’[342]

The ‘ghost in the heart and brain’ is the obsessions and impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is nothing but a ‘judgment day’ of the poet over himself, cannot be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with distinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the chief events and central characters are always astonishingly absurd and alien to all the realities of the world.

It is in Brand that Ibsen’s absurdity apparently achieves its greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiterated ad nauseam that this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard’s crazy ‘Either-Or.’ Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ‘all or nothing,’ and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. What he especially understands by these high-sounding words the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, however, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness, and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the following wonderful information (p. 151): ‘How long will the struggle last?’ (viz., the climbing, for there is no other struggle in this Act). ‘It lasts until life’s end. Until you have sacrificed all; until you are freed from your compact; until that which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.’ (What this is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ‘Until every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from the All or Nothing. And your sacrifices? All the gods which with you take the place of the eternal God; the shining golden chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid slothfulness. The reward of victory? Unity of will, activity of faith, pureness of soul.’ Naturally on listening to this ranting the good people ‘come to their senses and go home,’ but the lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want to pant uphill in order to ‘wish for something unswervingly,’ to attain to ‘all or nothing,’ and to arrive at ‘unity of will.’ For it is ‘the all’ which seems to inhabit mountains; not merely freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (‘Liberty dwells in the mountains,’ Schiller has said.)

And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling impulse,[343] who with furious passion are continually and reiteratingly talking of ‘the goal’ which they wish to attain, but who neither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is, nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his inflexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.

Ibsen’s absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an idea than the ‘tra-la-la’ sung to a song of which one has forgotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest of function[344] in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are continuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of profundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recognises them as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import. Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in consternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of their table companions at the habitual cafÉ. I will give some illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.

Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated between intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis of the centres of ideation.

In The Lady from the Sea (p. 25) Lyngstrand says: ‘I am to a certain extent a little infirm.’[345] This ‘to a certain extent’ is admirable! Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic projects (p. 51):

As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that he intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the sculptor’s mouth. But in Hedda Gabler, Brack, a sharp and clever bon vivant, says (p. 87): ‘But as far as regards myself, you know very well that I have always entertained a—a certain respect for the marriage tie, generally speaking, Mrs. Hedda.’ In Rosmersholm Brendel says (p. 24): ‘So you see when golden dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I fashioned them into poems, into visions, into pictures—in the rough, as it were, you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I have enjoyed in my time! The mysterious bliss of creation—in the rough, as I said.’ Rector Kroll says (p. 18): ‘A family that now soon for some centuries has held its place as the first in the land.’[346] ‘Now soon for some centuries’! That means that it is not yet ‘some centuries,’ but ‘soon’ will be ‘some centuries.’ Hence ‘soon’ must include in itself ‘some centuries.’ By what miracle? In The Wild Duck we have the intentionally, but, in their exaggeration impossibly, idiotic conversations of the ‘fat,’ ‘bald,’ and ‘short-sighted’ gentlemen in the first act, but also this remark by Gina, who is in no way depicted as an idiot (p. 270):

In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal, Gregers and Hjalmar we read (p. 289):

And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle (p. 305):

Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively profound, but in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness.

In A Doll’s House (p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion: ‘Well, after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and get them safe in;’ to which Rank significantly replies: ‘Yes, so people say. And it is that very consideration which turns society into a hospital.’ What does this meditative and oracular speech mean? Is it Rank’s opinion that society is a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it would be healthy if its sick were not cared for? Would the untended sick be any less sick? If he believes that he believes an idiocy. Or are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in this manner got rid of? If he preaches that, he preaches a barbarism and a crime, and that is not in accordance with Rank’s character as Ibsen depicts him. We may turn and twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always find either stupidity or want of meaning.

In Rosmersholm, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ‘devote all his life and all his energies to this one thing—the creation of a true democracy in this country.’ And, wonderful to relate, the persons to whom Rosmer says these words all seem to comprehend what the ‘true democracy’ is. Without being asked, Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of his Pythian utterance: ‘I want to awaken the democracy to its true task—that of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by setting free their minds and purifying their wills.... I will only try to arouse them to their task. They themselves must accomplish it ... by their own strength. There is no other.... Peace and joy and mutual forbearance must once more enter into their souls.’ Rebecca repeats to him his programme (p. 62):

You were to set resolutely to work in the world—the living world of to-day, as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to home; to win over minds and wills; to create noble men around you in wider and wider circles. Noblemen.

Rosmer. Joyful noblemen.

Rebecca. Yes, joyful.

Rosmer. For it is joy that ennobles the mind.

It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer going ‘from home to home’ ‘in wider and wider circles,’ and making the persons before whom he talks into ‘joyful noblemen,’ while he ‘awakens’ them and ‘purifies their wills,’ and thus ‘creates a true democracy.’ This rigmarole is, it is true, incomprehensible; but, at all events, it must be something agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs ‘joy’ to create ‘noblemen.’ And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly discovers (p. 102): ‘The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.’ What! Rosmer kill happiness when he ‘goes from home to home,’ awakening, winning, making people free, etc., and creating joyful noblemen? The word ‘joyful’ includes, at least, something of happiness, and yet the education of men to ‘joyful noblemen’ is to kill happiness? Rosmer finds (p. 97) ‘the work of ennobling men’s minds is not for him. And, besides, it is so hopeless in itself.’ This is in a measure intelligible, though it is not stated from what experience Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite beyond comprehension is Rebecca’s speech about the fatal influence of ‘the Rosmer view of life.’ In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving endeavours to explain her defunct husband’s vagaries in this balderdash (p. 187): ‘When he was a young lieutenant, he was brimming over with the joy of life. It was like a breezy day only to look at him. And what exuberant strength and vitality there was in him! And then, child of joy as he was—for he was like a child at the time—he had to live here at home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him, but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an office. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant, only loungers and boon companions.’ These antitheses seem to have something in them; but if we seriously set about hunting for a definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ‘Object in life—office’—‘work—business’—‘comrades—boon companions,’ are not in themselves oppositions, but become such through the individual. With a decent man they are perfectly coincident; with a base man they fall into opposition. A large or a small town has nothing to do with it. For Kant in the small town of Koenigsberg, in the last century, the ‘office’ was ‘the object in life,’ ‘work’ was ‘business,’ and he so chose his ‘boon companions’ that they were at the same time his ‘comrades,’ as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other hand, there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle of men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could feel at ease and in inward harmony.

In Hedda Gabler we find quite a multitude of such words, apparently saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ‘It was the passion for life in you!’ exclaims LÖvborg to Hedda (p. 128), with the seeming conviction that he has, in this utterance, explained something to her. And Hedda says (p. 142): ‘I see him before me. With vine-leaves in his hair. Hot and bold’ (p. 151). ‘And Ejlert LÖvborg, he is sitting with vine-leaves in his hair, and reading aloud’ (p. 157). ‘Had he vine-leaves in his hair?’ (p. 171). ‘So that is how it all happened. Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair’ (p. 188).

‘With vine-leaves in his hair;’ ‘the passion for life’—these are words meaning, in the connection assigned to them, absolutely nothing, but giving scope for dreaming. In a few instances Ibsen employs these dreamily-nebulous, shadowy expressions with poetic licence, e.g., when we read in The Pillars of Society (p. 19):

Dina is a young girl living under sad and painful conditions. It is psychologically accurate that she should condense all her longing for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional colouring, such as ‘beautiful.’ It is the same with the dialogue between Gregers and Hedwig in The Wild Duck (p. 53):

Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty (Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is changing, and that she willingly plays with fire); hence it is natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams, and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting something far away and wild, such as ‘in the depths of the sea,’ with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous surging in her. But when expressions of this sort are used, not by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.

These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words ‘joy of life’ appear in Ghosts (p. 176):

In Hedda Gabler the word ‘beauty’ plays a similar part (p. 190):

The ‘vine-leaves in the hair,’ in the same piece, belongs with equal exactness to this category of words, amounting to an obsession. The use of expressions full of mystery, incomprehensible to the hearer, and either freely coined by the speaker, or endowed by him with a peculiar sense, deviating from that usually assigned them in speech, is one of the most frequent phenomena among the mentally deranged. Griesinger[349] often lays stress on this, and A. Marie[350] adduces some characteristic examples of words and phrases, either newly invented or employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which have been repeated by the insane.

Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a dweller on the borderland—a ‘mattoid.’ His use of formalized expressions does not therefore go so far as the invention of new words, as cited by Dr. Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious meaning to the expressions ‘beauty,’ ‘joy of life,’ ‘courage of life,’ etc., and one which they do not possess when rationally used, follows clearly enough from the examples quoted.

Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense, corresponding to conversations held in dreams, and the silly rambling speech of persons suffering from fever or acute mania. In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida says (p. 39): ‘The water in the fjord here is sick, ... yes, sick. And I believe it makes one sick, too’ (p. 79). ‘We’ (Ellida and the ‘stranger’) ‘spoke of the gulls and the eagles, and all the other sea-birds. I think—isn’t it wonderful?—when we talked of such things it seemed to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one with him.... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too’ (p. 100).

And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says (p. 129):

We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory, blurred, deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and the dream-like drivel, have essentially conduced to obtain for Ibsen his particular admirers. Over them hysterical mystics can dream, like Dina and Hedwig, over the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘in the depths of the sea.’ As they mean absolutely nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them whatever significance may be suggested by the play of association under the influence of momentary emotion. They are, moreover, exceedingly grateful material for the (so-called) ‘comprehensives,’ for whom nothing is ever obscure. ‘Comprehensives’ always explain everything. The greater the idiocy, the more involved, the richer in import, the more exhaustive is its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance with which these beings of ‘perfect comprehension’ look down upon the barbarian, who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian.

In an exceedingly amusing French farce, Le Homard, a husband suddenly returning home one evening surprises a stranger with his wife. The latter does not lose her presence of mind, and says to the husband that, having suddenly been seized with illness, she had sent her maid for the first available doctor, and that this gentleman was the doctor. The husband thanks the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if he has already prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is not a doctor, tries to make himself scarce; but the anxious husband insists on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a glance at it; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ‘And will the chemist be able to read that?’ asks the husband, shaking his head. ‘As if it were print,’ asseverates the false physician, again trying to make his escape. The husband, however, adjures him to remain, and holds him fast until the maid returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she makes her appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe. No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and some powders. ‘Did the chemist give you those?’ demands the Galen in bewilderment. ‘Certainly.’ ‘On my prescription?’ ‘Of course it was on your prescription,’ replies the astonished maid. ‘Has the chemist made some mistake?’ interposes the troubled husband. ‘No, no,’ our Galen hastens to reply; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time, and becomes lost in reverie.

These ‘comprehensives’ are like the chemist in Le Homard. They read with fluency all Ibsen’s prescriptions, and especially those containing absolutely no written characters, but simply crow’s feet devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to supply critical pills and electuaries when a piece of paper is brought to them bearing the signature of a self-styled doctor, and they dispense them without wincing, be there anything of any sort, or even nothing, on the slip of paper. Is it not significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the French mystic De VoguÉ, one of these ‘comprehensives,’ finds to praise is one of the meaningless phrases above cited?[351]

A final stigma of Ibsen’s mysticism must be considered—his symbolism. In The Wild Duck, this bird is the symbol of Hjalmar’s destiny, and the garret next the photographic studio a symbol of the ‘living lie,’ of which, according to Relling, everyone stands in need. In The Lady from the Sea, Lyngstrand wishes to make a group which shall be the symbol of Ellida, as the ‘stranger’ with the changing eyes of a fish is of the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ‘stranger’ is really the symbol of a symbol. In Ghosts, the burning of the asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving’s ‘living lie,’ and the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole piece the symbol of the depressed and sullen frame of mind of the personages in action. Ibsen’s earlier pieces, Emperor and Galilean, Brand, Peer Gynt, literally swarm with symbols. A mysterious collateral significance is given to every figure and every stage accessory, and every word includes a double meaning. From the ‘Psychology of Mysticism’ we already know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus of the wholly unconnected representations springing up in consciousness through the play of automatic association, that it attributes hidden but essential reference to each other in these representations. The ‘comprehensives’ believe they have said all when, with an extremely consequential and self-satisfied air, they demonstrate that the ‘stranger’ in The Lady from the Sea signifies the sea, and the sea freedom. They quite overlook the fact that the thing to be explained is not what the poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in particular, why he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all. In the well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet calls ‘a cat a cat.’ That to express so sober an idea as that persons of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep longing for a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should have the whim to invent a ‘stranger with fish-like eyes,’ presupposes a diseased mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency to allegory and symbolism is very common. ‘Intricate arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic gestures and attitudes, strange interpretations of natural events, punning, word-coining, and peculiar modes of expression, frequently occurring in paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque colouring.’ Thus writes Tanzi,[352] and in the symbolism of the insane he saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism. Among men low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in fact, the habitual form of thought. We know the reason—their brain is not yet trained to attention; it is too weak to suppress irrational associations, and refers all that shoots through its consciousness to some chance phenomenon either just perceived, or else remembered.

After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we have become acquainted—his theological obsessions of original sin, of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his symbolism—he might be numbered among the mystic degenerates with which I have concerned myself in the previous chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his place among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic than his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of anarchism. He is in a state of constant revolt against all that exists. He never exercises rational criticism with regard to this; he never shows what is bad, why it is bad, and how it could be made better. No; he only reproaches it with its existence, and has only one longing—to destroy it. ‘The ruin of everything’ was the programme of certain destructives in 1848, and has remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem, To my Friend the Destructive Orator. In this he glorifies the deluge as the ‘sole revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler’ (Halohedsfusker); but even it was not radically ruinous enough. ‘We want to make it still more radical, but for that end we need men and orators. You charge yourselves with flooding the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully a torpedo under the ark.’[353] In a series of letters offered by elephant-driver Brandes for the edification of the adorers of Ibsen, the poet gives conspicuous specimens of his theories.[354] The state must be destroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for freedom has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its own end. As soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and cease to fight for it, we prove it to be lost to us. The meritorious thing in the fight for liberty is the state of permanent revolt against all existing things which it presupposes. There is nothing fixed and permanent. ‘Who warrants me that in the planet Jupiter twice two are not five?’ (This remark is an unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt,[355] which in recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true marriage. Friends are a costly luxury. ‘They have long hindered me from being myself.’ The care of the ‘I’ is the sole task of man. He ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it by any law or any consideration.

These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also puts into the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already cited some of Mrs. Alving’s and Nora’s ego-maniacal and anarchical phrases. In The Pillars of Society, Dina says (p. 19): ‘If only the people I lived amongst weren’t so proper and moral. Every day Hilda and Netta come here that I may take example by them. I can never be as well behaved as they are, and I won’t be’ (p. 44).

In An Enemy of the People (p. 278) Stockmann declares: ‘I detest leading men ... they stand in the path of a free man wherever he turns—and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other noxious animals.’ (p. 280) ‘The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are the compact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal majority—they it is.... The majority is never right.... The minority is always right.’ Where Ibsen does not seriously attack the majority he derides it—e.g., when he entrusts the maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. In An Enemy of the People (p. 238):

In Rosmersholm (p. 53):

With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always personifies the sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees only. In Ghosts the blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches (p. 142): ‘What right have we human beings to happiness? No, we have to do our duty! And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you are bound by a holy tie.’ In The Pillars of Society it is the rogue Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordination of the individual to the community (p. 58): ‘People must learn to moderate their personal claims if they are to fulfil their duties in the community in which they are placed.’ In An Enemy of the People the not less pitiable burgomaster sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this fashion (p. 209): ‘Anyhow, you’ve an ingrained propensity for going your own way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole community.’

The trick is evident: to make the conception of the necessary subordination of the individual ridiculous and contemptible, Ibsen appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible beings. On the other hand, it is the characters on whom he lavishes all the wealth of his affection to whom he entrusts the duty of defending rebellion against duty, the aspersion or derision of laws, morals, institutions, self-discipline, and the proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the sole guide of life.

The psychological roots of Ibsen’s anti-social impulses are well known. They are the degenerate’s incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resulting discomfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate himself. ‘The criminal,’ Lombroso[356] says, ‘in consequence of his neurotic and impulsive nature, and his hatred of the institutions which have punished or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, who finds in insurrection the means not only of satisfying his passions, but of even having them countenanced for the first time by a numerous public.’ This utterance is exactly applicable to Ibsen, with the slight change, that he is merely a theoretic criminal, his motor centres not being powerful enough to transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into deeds, and that he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses not in the insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition.

His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an anarchist, but also a misanthrope, and fills him with a profound weariness of life. The doctrine of An Enemy of the People is contained in Stockmann’s exclamation (p. 315): ‘The strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone’; and in Rosmersholm (p. 24), Brendel says: ‘I like to take my pleasures in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.’ The same Brendel subsequently laments (p. 105): ‘I am going homewards; I am home-sick for the mighty Void.... Peter Mortensgaard never wills more than he can do. Peter Mortensgaard is capable of living his life without ideals. And that, do you see, that is just the mighty secret of action and of victory. It is the sum of the whole world’s wisdom.... The dark night is best. Peace be with you!’ Brendel’s words have a peculiar significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,[357] Ibsen wished to portray himself in that personage. That which is expressed in these passages is the dÉgoÛt des gens and the tedium vitÆ of alienists, phenomena never absent in depressed forms of mental alienation.

In addition to his mysticism and ego-mania, Ibsen’s extraordinary poverty of ideas indicates another stigma of degeneracy. Superficial or ignorant judges, who appraise an artist’s intellectual wealth by the number of volumes he has produced, believe that when they point at the high pile of a degenerate’s works they have victoriously refuted the accusation of his infecundity. The well-informed are of course not entrapped by this paltry method of proof. The history of insane literature knows of a large number of cases in which fools have written and published dozens of thick volumes. For tens of years and in feverish haste they must have driven the pen, almost continuously, night and day; but since all these bulky tomes contain not a single idea of any utility, this restless activity is not to be termed fruitful, in spite of the abundant typographical results. We have seen that Richard Wagner never invented a tale, a figure, a situation; but that he sponged on ancient poems or the Bible. Ibsen has almost as little genuine original creative power as his intellectual relative, and as he, in his beggar’s pride, disdains for the most part to borrow from other poets of procreative capacity, or from popular traditions exuberant with life, his poems reveal, when closely and keenly examined, an even greater poverty than those of Wagner. If we do not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the art of variation in a contrapuntist extraordinarily clever in dramatic technique, and follow the themes he so adroitly elaborates, we at once recognise their dreary monotony.

At the central point of all his pieces (with the exception of those of a romantic character, written by him in his first period of pure imitation) stand two figures, always the same and fundamentally one, but having now a negative and now a positive sign, a thesis and antithesis in the Hegelian sense. They are, on the one hand, the human being who obeys his inner law only (that is, his ego-mania), and dauntlessly and defiantly makes a parade of it; and, on the other, the individual who, it is true, really acts in obedience to his ego-mania only, but has not the courage to display it, feigning respect for the law of others and for the notions of the majority—in other words, the avowed and violent anarchist, and his opposite, the crafty and timorously deceitful anarchist.

The avowed ego-maniac is, with one single exception, always embodied in a woman. The exception is Brand. On the contrary, the hypocrite is always a man—again with a single exception, viz., that of Hedda Gabler, who does not personify the idea in its purity, frank anarchism in her nature being mingled with something of hypocrisy. Nora (A Doll’s House), Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Selma Malsberg (The League of the Young), Dina, Martha Hessel, Mrs. Bernick (The Pillars of Society), Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca (Rosmersholm), are one and the same figure, but seen, as it were, at different hours of the day, and consequently in different lights. Some are in the major, others in the minor, key; some are more, others less hysterically deranged; but essentially they are not only similar, but identical. Selma Malsberg (p. 60) cries: ‘Bear our unhappiness in common? Am I yet good enough? No. I can no longer keep silent, be a hypocrite and a liar. Now you shall know.... O, how you have wronged me! Infamously, all of you!... How I have thirsted for a drop of your care! But when I begged for it you repulsed me with a polite joke. You dressed me like a doll. You played with me as with a child.... I want to go away from you.... Let me, let me.’ And Nora (p. 110): ‘I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald.... You and your father have sinned greatly against me. It is the fault of you two that nothing has been made of me. I was never happy, only merry.... Our house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa’s doll-child.... That is why I am going away from you now.... I shall now leave your house at once.’ Ellida (The Lady from the Sea): ‘What I want is that we should, of our own free will, release each other.... I am not what you took me for. Now you see it yourself. Now we can separate as friends, and freely.... Here there is no single thing that attracts me and binds me. I am so absolutely rootless in your house, Wangel.’ Selma threatens to leave, Ellida resolves to leave, Nora does leave, Mrs. Alving did leave. (Ghosts, p. 144) Pastor Manders: ‘All your efforts have been bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You have never been willing to endure any bond. Everything that has weighed upon you in life you have cast away without care or conscience, like a burden you could throw off at will. It did not please you to be a wife any longer, and you left your husband. You found it troublesome to be a mother, and you sent your child forth among strangers.’ Mrs. Bernick was, equally with her double, Mrs. Alving, a stranger in her own house. She, however, does not wish to leave, but to remain and endeavour to win over her husband (p. 112): ‘For many years I believed that you had once been mine, and I had lost you again. Now I know that you never were mine; but I shall win you.’ Dina (The Pillars of Society) cannot leave because she is not yet married, but as becomes her state of maidenhood, she gives her rebellious thoughts this form (p. 93): ‘I will be your wife; but first I will work, and become something for myself, just as you are. I will give myself; I will not be taken.’ Rebecca (Rosmersholm) is also unmarried, yet she runs away (p. 96):

Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies his ego-mania without giving offence to society. This personage presents himself under the names successively of Torvald Helmer, Consul Bernick, Curate RÖrlund, Rector Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster Stockmann, Werle, and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler, always with the same ideas and the same words. In A Doll’s House (p. 104, et seq.), after his wife’s confession, Helmer cries: ‘Oh, what an awful awakening!... No religion, no morality, no sense of duty.... He can publish the whole story; and if he does publish it, perhaps I should be suspected of having been a party to your criminal transactions.... I must try to pacify him in one way or the other. The story must be kept secret, cost what it may.’ In Ghosts Pastor Manders on different occasions expresses himself thus: ‘One is certainly not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and thinks within one’s own four walls.... We must not expose ourselves to false interpretations, and we have no right whatever to give offence to our neighbours.... You go and risk your good name and reputation, and nearly succeed in ruining other people’s reputation into the bargain. It was unspeakably reckless of you to seek refuge with me.... Yes, that is the only thing possible’ (to ‘hush the matter up’) ‘... yes, family life is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such a case as you point to’ (an incestuous union), ‘one can never know.’ RÖrlund (The Pillars of Society): ‘See how the family is undermined over there! how a brazen spirit of destruction is attacking the most vital truths!... Of course, a tare now and then springs up among the wheat, alas! but we honestly do our best to weed it out.... Oh, Dina, you can form no conception of the thousand considerations! When a man is placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why—he cannot be too careful.... Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me! Hush! someone is coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the others.... A good book forms a refreshing contrast to what we unhappily see every day in newspapers and magazines.’ Consul Bernick, in the same piece: ‘Just at this time, when I depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press and in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all over the country-side.... These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping at us.... I whose mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t do for me to have my name bespattered in this way.... I must keep my conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression on both the press and the public at large when they see that I set aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its course.’ Kroll, in Rosmersholm: ‘Do you ever see the Radical papers?... But you’ve seen, then, I suppose, how these gentlemen of “the people” have been pleased to treat me? what infamous abuse they’ve dared to heap upon me?’ Werle, in The Wild Duck: ‘Even if, out of attachment to me, she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that——?’ The Burgomaster, in An Enemy of the People: ‘If, perhaps, I do watch over my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the good of the town.... Your statement ... must be kept back for the good of all ... we will do the best we can quietly; but nothing whatever, not a single word, of this unfortunate business must be made public.... And then you have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every possible and impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an idea than you must write at once some newspaper article or a whole pamphlet about it.’ Finally, Hedda Gabler: ‘And so you went off perfectly openly?... But what do you suppose that people will say about you, then?... I so dread a scandal! You should accept for your own sake, or, better still, for the world’s sake.’

If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are read successively, an impression must be formed that they are part of the same rÔle; and this impression is correct, for under all the different names there is only one rÔle. The same is true of the women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora, unselfishly sacrifice themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel, Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are always the same figure in different guises. The monotony, moreover, extends to minutest details. Rank’s inherited disease is in Oswald’s case only carried further. Nora’s flight is repeated in almost every piece, and in The Wild Duck is travestied in Hjalmar’s departure from his house. One feature of this scene appears word for word in all the rÉchauffÉs of it:

In A Doll’s House, the heroine, who has settled her account with life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe, makes Rank play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she dances to it. In Hedda Gabler, the heroine is heard ‘suddenly playing a wild dance’ before she shoots herself. Rosmer says to Rebecca, when the latter makes known her wish to die: ‘No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do what she dared.’ The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to commit suicide: ‘Oh, you don’t frighten me! An elegant spoilt lady like you.... People don’t do things of that sort.’ Brack says, in response to Hedda Gabler’s outburst: ‘Rather die! That’s what people say, but nobody does it!’ In much the same words Helmer reproaches his wife Nora with having sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor Manders upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick, and Rebecca from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle’s crime was the seduction of the maidservant Gina. Alving’s crime was the seduction of his own maidservant. This pitiable and imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this impotence of his indolent brain to wash out the imprint of an idea once painfully elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of names for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under the influence of a reminiscence. In A Doll’s House we have Helmer; in The Wild Duck, Hjalmar; in The Pillars of Society, Hilmar, Mrs. Bernick’s brother.

Thus Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees, at each shaking of the cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this toy. But adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always the same, inserted haphazard, and united into symmetrical figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not only to Ibsen’s plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for thirty years he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic patterns, these are his obsessions. These have existed in his own diseased mind, and have not sprung from observation of the world’s drama. The pretended ‘realist’ knows nothing of real life. He does not comprehend it; he does not even see it, and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions, ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manufacturing cannon is to take a tube and pour molten metal round it. Ibsen proceeds in a similar way with his poems. He has a thesis—more accurately, some anarchistic folly; this is the tube. It is now only a question of enveloping this tube with the metal of life’s realities. But that lies beyond Ibsen’s power. At best he occasionally finds some bits of worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box, by rummaging among dust-heaps; but this small quantity of metal does not suffice for a cannon. Where Ibsen makes strenuous efforts to produce a picture of actual contemporaneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his experience.

Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this. It sinks below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber and Sir John Lubbock have recorded incidents of this sort in their observations of colonies of ants. The small features pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole life have never formed a clearer thought than: ‘How can I get hold of a bottle of brandy?’ or ‘How can I make myself interesting to men?’ The sole characteristic distinguishing these LÖvborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas, do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to require strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the obtaining of a position in a bank (A Doll’s House); their catastrophes, that one no longer believes in the articles of their creed (Rosmersholm); the loss of an appointment as physician at a watering-place (An Enemy of the People); the raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnal pÉchÉ de jeunesse (The Pillars of Society); the frightful crimes darkening, like a thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their social circle are an intrigue with a maidservant (Ghosts, The Wild Duck); a liaison with an itinerant music-hall singer (An Enemy of the People); the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (The Wild Duck); the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good dinner (Hedda Gabler). It sometimes happens to me to pass a half-hour in the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter and play of the little ones. One day the children by accident saw the arrest of someone in the street. Although their attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant spectacle, they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found them full of the great event, and I became the auditor of the following dialogue:

This childish conversation always came into my mind when I lighted, in Ibsen’s plays, upon one of his crimes treated with such overawing importance.

We have now made the complete tour of Ibsen. At the risk of being prolix and tedious, I have made copious quotations from his writings, in order that the reader might himself see the matter from which I have formed my judgments. Ibsen stands before us as a mystic and an ego-maniac, who would willingly prove the world and mankind not worth powder and shot, but who only proves that he has not the faintest inkling of one or the other. Incapable of adapting himself to any state of things whatsoever, he first abuses the state of things in Norway, then that of Europe generally. In no one of his productions is a single thought to be met with belonging to, or having an active influence on, the present age, unless we bestow this honour on his anarchism, which is explained by the diseased constitution of his mind, and his travesties of the least certain results of investigations in hypnotism and telepathy. He is a skilful dramatic technician, and knows how to represent with great poetic power personages in the background, and situations out of the chief current of the piece. This, however, is all that a conscientious and lucid analysis can really find in him. He has dared to speak of his ‘moral ideas,’ and his admirers glibly repeat the expression. Ibsen’s moral ideas! Any reader of the Ibsen drama, who finds in them no food for laughter, has truly no sense of humour. He seems to preach apostacy, yet cannot free himself from the religious ideas of confession, original sin, and the Saviour’s act of redemption. He sets up egoism and the freedom of the individual from all scruples as an ideal, yet hardly has anyone acted somewhat unscrupulously, but he begins to whimper contritely, and continues until his heart, full to suffocation, has poured itself out in confession; while the only persons with whom he succeeds are women, who sacrifice their individuality to the point of annihilation for the sake of others. He extols every offence against morality as heroism, while he punishes, with nothing less than death, the smallest and stupidest love affair. He uses the words freedom, progress, etc., as a gargle, and in his best works honours lying and stagnation. And all these contradictions appear forsooth not successively as stations on the road of his development, but at one and the same time, and side by side. His French admirer, Ehrhard,[358] sees this disconcerting fact, and endeavours as best he can to excuse it. His Norwegian interpreter, Henrik Jaeger, on the contrary, asserts with the utmost placidity[359] that the most prominent characteristic of Ibsen’s works is their unity (Enhed). The Frenchman and the Norwegian were most incautious in not preconcerting, prior to praising their great man in manners so divergent. The single discoverable unity in Ibsen is his faculty of distortion. The point in which he always resembles himself is his entire incapacity to elaborate a single clear thought, to comprehend a single one of the watchwords daubed here and there on to his works, or to deduce the true conclusions from a single one of his premises.

And this malignant, anti-social simpleton, highly gifted, it must be admitted, in the technique of the stage, they have had the audacity to try to raise upon the shield as the great world-poet of the closing century. His partizans have continued to shout, ‘Ibsen is a great poet!’ until all stronger judgments have become at least hesitating, and feebler ones wholly subjugated. In a recent book on Simon Magus,[360] there occurs this pretty story: ‘Apsethus, the Libyan, wished to become a god. In spite, however, of his most strenuous efforts he could not succeed in satisfying his longing. But, at any rate, he would make the people believe that he had become a god. He therefore collected a large number of parrots, in which Libya abounds, and shut them all in a cage. He kept them so for some time, and taught them to say, “Apsethus is a god.” When the birds had learnt this, he opened the cage and set them free. And the birds spread themselves throughout Libya, so that the words penetrated to the Greek settlements. And the Libyans, astonished at the voice of the birds, and not suspecting the trick Apsethus had played, looked upon him as a god.’ In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, Ibsen has taught a few ‘comprehensives’—the Brandes, Ehrhards, Jaegers, etc.—the words: ‘Ibsen is a modern! Ibsen is a poet of the future!’ and the parrots have spread over all the lands, and are chattering with deafening din in books and papers, ‘Ibsen is great! Ibsen is a modern spirit!’ and imbeciles among the public murmur the cry after them, because they hear it frequently repeated, and because, on such as they, every word uttered with emphasis and assurance makes an impression.

It would certainly be a proof of superficiality to believe that the audacity of his Corybantes alone explains the high place to which Ibsen has been fraudulently elevated. Without question he possesses characteristics by which he could not but act upon his contemporaries.

Firstly, we have his vague phrases and indefinite incidental hints concerning ‘the great epoch in which we live,’ ‘the new era about to dawn,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘progress,’ etc. These phrases were bound to please all dreamers and drivellers, for they give free scope to any interpretation, and, in particular, allow the presumption that their author is possessed of modernity and a bold spirit of progress. They are not discouraged by the fact that Ibsen himself makes cruel sport of these ‘comprehensives,’ when, in The Wild Duck, he makes Relling (p. 361) use the word ‘demoniac,’ while admitting it to be wholly meaningless, just as the poet himself employs his own bunkum about progress and freedom. They are ‘comprehensives’ precisely because they interpret every passage according to their own sweet will.

Then there is Ibsen’s doctrine of the right of the individual to live in accordance with his own law. Is this really his doctrine? This must be denied when, after struggling through his countless contradictions and self-refutations, we see that he treats with peculiar affection the sacrificial lambs, who are all negation of their own ‘I,’ all suppression of their most natural impulses, all neighbourly love and consideration for others. In any case, his apostles have brought forward anarchistic individualism as the central doctrine of his drama. Ehrhard[361] sums up this doctrine in these words: ‘The revolt of the individual against society. In other words, Ibsen is the apostle of moral autonomy (autonomie morale).’ Now such a doctrine is surely well fitted to cause ravages among the intellectually indolent or intellectually incapable.

Ehrhard dares to use the expression ‘moral autonomy.’ In the name of this fine principle Ibsen’s critical heralds persuade the youth who gather round him that they have the right to ‘live out their lives,’ and they smile approvingly when their auditors understand by this term the right to yield to their basest instincts and to free themselves from all discipline. As the scoundrels in Mediterranean ports do with well-dressed travellers, they whisper in the ear of their public, ‘Amuse yourselves! Enjoy yourselves! Come with me; I will show you the way!’ But to confound ‘moral autonomy’ with absence of restraint is, on the part of their faith, a monstrous error, and in the corrupters of youth, hoping for the pay of procuration, an infamous deception.

These two notions are not only not synonymous, they are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Liberty of the individual! The right to autonomy! The Ego its own legislator! Who is this ‘I’ that is to make laws for itself? Who is this ‘Self’ for whom Ibsen demands the right of autonomy? Who is this free individual? That the entire notion of a Self opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and exclusive is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen in the chapter on the ‘Psychology of Ego-mania,’ and I need not, therefore, dwell again on the subject in this place. We know that man, like every other complex and highly developed living being, is a society or state, of simpler, and of simplest, living beings, of cells and cell-systems, or organs, all having their own functions and wants. In the course of the development of life on earth they have become associated, and have undergone changes, in order to be able to perform higher functions than are possible to the simple cell and primitive agglomeration of cells. The highest function of life yet known to us is clear consciousness; the most elevated content of consciousness is knowledge; and the most obvious and immediate aim of knowledge is constantly to procure better conditions of life for the organism, hence to preserve its existence as long as possible, and to fill it with the greatest possible number of pleasurable sensations. In order that the collective organism may be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound to submit to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its interior is disease, and leads rapidly to death. The single cell executes its chemical work of decomposition and of integration without troubling itself about aught else. It labours almost for itself alone. Its consciousness is the most limited conceivable; it has hardly any prevision; its own power of adaptation is so minute that if a cell is in the smallest degree less well nourished than its neighbour, it cannot hold its ground against the latter, and is immediately devoured by it.[362] The differentiated cell-group, or organ, already possesses a wider consciousness, whose seat is its own nerve-ganglia; its function is more complex, and no longer operates wholly, or even chiefly, for its own benefit, but for that of the collective organism; it also has already, I might say, a constitutional influence on the direction of the affairs of the whole organism, asserting itself in the power of the organ to suggest to consciousness presentations prompting the will to acts. The most exalted organ, however, the condensation of all the other organs, is the gray cerebral cortex. It is the seat of clear consciousness. It works least of all for itself, most of all for the commonwealth—i.e., for the whole organism. It is the government of the State. To it come all reports from the interior as well as the exterior; it has to find its way in the midst of all complications; it has to exercise foresight, and to take into consideration not only the immediate effect of an act, but also the more remote consequences for the commonwealth. When, therefore, it is a question of the ‘I,’ the ‘Self,’ the ‘Individual,’ it cannot be any subordinate part of the organism which is meant, such as the little toe or the rectum, but only the gray cerebral cortex. To it certainly belongs the right and duty of directing the individual and of prescribing its law. It is consciousness itself. But how does consciousness form its judgments and its decisions? It forms them from representations awakened in it by excitations proceeding from the internal organs and from the senses. If consciousness allows itself to be directed solely by the organic excitations, it seeks to gratify its momentary appetites, on the spot, at the cost of well-being, it injures an organ by favouring the need of another, and it neglects to take into consideration circumstances of the external world which must be dealt with in the interest of the whole organism. Let me give some quite simple illustrations. A man is swimming under water. His cells know nothing of it, and do not trouble themselves about it. They quietly absorb from the blood the oxygen which they need at the moment, and set free, in exchange, carbonic dioxide. The decomposed blood excites the medulla oblongata, and the latter impetuously demands a movement of inspiration. Were the gray cerebral cortex to yield to the perfectly justifiable demand of one organ, and allow an impulse to inspire to proceed to the muscles concerned, the consequence would be the filling of the lungs with water, and death of the entire organism in consequence. Hence consciousness does not obey the demand of the medulla oblongata, and, instead of sending motor impulses to the intercostal muscles and those of the diaphragm, communicates them to the muscles of the arms and legs; instead of breathing under water, the swimmer emerges at the surface. Another instance. A typhoid convalescent feels ragingly hungry. Were he to yield to this desire, he might give himself a momentary satisfaction, but twenty-four hours later he would probably die from perforation of the intestines. Hence his consciousness resists the desire of his organs for the benefit of the whole organism. The cases are, of course, generally much more complex. But it is always the task of consciousness to test the stimuli which it receives from the depths of the organs, to comprise in the motor images which they excite all its earlier experiences, its knowledge, the directions given by the external world, and to disregard the stimuli if the judgments opposed to them are more powerful than they.

Even a perfectly healthy organism quickly goes to rack and ruin if the inhibitive activity of consciousness is not exercised, and if, through this want of exercise, its inhibitive strength becomes atrophied. CÆsarian madness[363] is nothing but the consequence of the systematic indulgence by consciousness of every demand of the organs. If, however, the organism is not perfectly healthy; if it is degenerate, its ruin is much more speedy and certain when it obeys the urging of its organs, for in such a case these organs are suffering from perversions; they exact satisfactions, not only pernicious in their remote consequences to the whole organism, but immediately so to the organs themselves.

When, therefore, the ‘I’ is spoken of, which is to have the right to dispose of itself, only the conscious ‘Ego’ can be meant, the pondering, remembering, observing, comparing intellect, not, however, the sub-’Egos’—unconnected, and for the most part at strife with each other—which are included in subconsciousness.[364] The individual is the judging, not the instinctive, human being. Liberty is the capacity of consciousness to derive excitations, not only from the stimuli of the organs, but from those of the senses, and from original memory-images. Ibsen’s liberty is the most abject, and always suicidal,[365] slavery. It is the subjugation of judgment to instinct, and the revolt of some single organ against the domination of that power, which has to watch over the well-being of the whole organism. Even so individualistic a philosopher as Herbert Spencer[366] says: ‘To become fitted for the social state, it is necessary that the man ... should possess the energy capable of renouncing a small enjoyment of the moment, in order to obtain a greater one in the future.’ A healthy man in the full vigour of intellect cannot sacrifice his judgment. The sacrifizio dell’ intelletto is the only one he cannot afford. If law and custom impose upon him acts which he recognises as absurd because they defeat their end, not only will he have the right, but it will be his duty, to defend reason against nonsense, and knowledge against error. But his revolt will always be in the name of judgment, not in the name of instinct.

All this philosophy of self-restraint can, it is true, be preached to healthy human beings only. It has no application to degenerates. Their defective brain and nervous system are not in a state to respond to its demands. The processes within their organs are morbidly intensified. Hence the latter send particularly powerful stimuli to consciousness. The sensory nerves conduct badly. The memory-images in the brain are faint. Perceptions of the external world, representations of anterior experiences, are, therefore, non-existent or too feeble to subdue the stimulus originating in the organs. Such persons can do nought else but follow their desires and impulsions. They are the ‘instinctivists’ and ‘impulsivists’ of mental therapeutics. To this species belong the Noras, Ellidas, Rebeccas, Stockmanns, Brands, etc. This company, being dangerous to themselves and to others, require to be put under the guardianship of rational men, or, better still, in lunatic asylums. Such must be the answer to those fools or charlatans who vaunt Ibsen’s figures as ‘free men’ and ‘strong personalities,’ and with the sweet-sounding tones of a Pied Piper’s air on ‘self-disposal,’ ‘moral independence,’ and ‘living life out,’ attract children devoid of judgment heaven knows whither, but in any case to their ruin.

The third feature of Ibsen’s drama accounting for his success is the light in which he shows woman. ‘Women are the pillars of society,’ he makes Bernick say (in The Pillars of Society, p. 114). With Ibsen woman has no duties and all rights. The tie of marriage does not bind her. She runs away when she longs for liberty, or when she believes she has cause of complaint against her husband, or when he pleases her a little less than another man. The man who plays the Joseph, and does not comply with the will of Madame Potiphar, does not draw on himself the customary ridicule; he is roundly pronounced a criminal (Ghosts, p. 158):

Pastor Manders. It was my greatest victory, Helen—the victory over myself.

Mrs. Alving. It was a crime against us both.

Woman is always the clever, strong, courageous being; man always the simpleton and coward. In every encounter the wife is victorious, and the man flattened out like a pancake. Woman need live for herself alone. With Ibsen she has even overcome her most primitive instinct—that of motherhood—and abandons her brood without twitching an eyelid when the caprice seizes her to seek satisfactions elsewhere. Such abject adoration of woman—a pendant to Wagner’s woman-idolatry—such unqualified approval of all feminine depravities, was bound to secure the applause of those women who in the viragoes of Ibsen’s drama—hysterical, nymphomaniacal, perverted in maternal instinct[367]—recognise either their own portrait or the ideal of development of their degenerate imagination. Women of this species find, as a matter of fact, all discipline intolerable. They are by birth les femmes de ruisseau of Dumas fils. They are not fit for marriage—for European marriage with one man only. Promiscuous sexual intercourse and prostitution are their most deeply-seated instincts, according to Ferrero[368] the atavistic form of degeneration in women, and they are grateful to Ibsen for having catalogued, under the fine designations of ‘The struggle of woman for moral independence’ and ‘The right of woman to assert her own personality,’ those propensities to which opprobrious names are usually given.

In his fiercely travestied exaggerations of Ibsen’s doctrines, entitled Der Vater, GrÄfin Julie, GlÄubiger, etc., poor Grindberg, whose brain is equally deranged, but who possesses great creative power, goes to the greatest pains to show the absurdity of Ibsen’s notions on the nature of woman, her rights, her relations to man. His method, however, is a false one. He will never convince Ibsen by rational arguments that his doctrines are foolish, for they do not spring from his reason, but from his unconscious instincts. His figures of women and their destinies are the poetical expression of that sexual perversion of degenerates called by Krafft-Ebing ‘masochism.’[369] Masochism is a sub-species of ‘contrary sexual sensation.’ The man affected by this perversion feels himself, as regards woman, to be the weaker party; as the one standing in need of protection; as the slave who rolls on the ground, compelled to obey the behests of his mistress, and finding his happiness in obedience. It is the inversion of the healthy and natural relation between the sexes. In Sacher-Masoch imperious and triumphant woman wields the knout; in Ibsen she exacts confessions, inflicts inflammatory reprimands, and leaves in a flare of Bengal lights. In essence, Ibsen’s heroines are the same as Sacher-Masoch’s, though the expression of feminine superiority is a little less brutal. It is remarkable that the women who exult over Ibsen’s Nora-types are not shocked by the Hedwigs, Miss Tesmans, and other womanly embodiments of sacrifice, in whom the highly contradictory thoughts and feelings of the confused mystic come to light. But it has been psychologically established that human beings overlook what is in dissonance with their own propinquities, and dwell on that only which is in harmony with them.

Ibsen’s feminine clientÈle is, moreover, not composed merely of hysterical and degenerate characters, but includes also those women who are leading an unhappy married life, or believe themselves misunderstood, or suffer from the discontent and inner void resulting from insufficient occupation. Clear thinking is not the most prominent quality of this species of woman. Otherwise they would not have found their advocate in Ibsen. Ibsen is not their friend. No one is who, as long as the present order of society exists, attacks the institution of marriage.

A serious and healthy reformer will contend for the principle that marriage should acquire a moral and emotional import, and not remain a lying form. He will condemn the marriage for interest, a dowry or business marriage; he will brand as a crime the action of married couples who feel for some other human being a strong, true love, tested by time and struggle, and yet remain together in a cowardly pseudo-union, deceiving and contaminating each other, instead of honourably separating and contracting genuine connections elsewhere; he will demand that marriage be based on reciprocal inclination, maintained by confidence, respect, and gratitude, consolidated by consideration for the offspring; but he will guard himself from saying anything against marriage itself, this bulwark of the relations between the sexes afforded by definite, permanent duty. Marriage is a high advance from the free copulation of savages. To abandon it and return to primitive promiscuity would be the most profound atavism of degeneracy. Marriage, moreover, was not instituted for the man, but for the woman and the child. It is a protective social institution for the benefit of the weaker part. Man has not yet conquered and humanized his polygamous animal instincts to the same extent as woman. It would for the most part be quite agreeable to him to exchange the woman he possesses for a new one. Departures À la Nora are as a rule not of a nature to frighten him. He could open the door very wide for Nora, and bestow on her his parting benediction with much pleasure. Were it once the law and custom in a society where each was forced to care for himself alone (and needed only to trouble himself about the offspring of others, when it was a question of orphan, abandoned, or begging children) that man and wife should separate as soon as they ceased to be agreeable to each other, it would be the men and not the women who would first make use of the new liberty. Departures À la Nora are perhaps without danger for rich wives, or those eminently capable of acquiring means of support, and hence pecuniarily independent. Such, however, in present society constitute a minute minority. Under Ibsen’s code of morals the vast majority of wives would have everything to lose. The severe discipline of matrimony is their bulwark. It obliges the man to take care of the children and of the wife as she declines in years. Hence it should be the true duty of rational wives to declare Ibsen infamous, and to revolt against Ibsenism, which criminally threatens them and their rights. Only through error can women of spirit and indisputable morality join the ranks of Ibsen’s followers. It is necessary to enlighten them concerning the range of his doctrines, and in particular concerning their effect on the position of woman, so that they may abandon a company which can never be their own. May he remain surrounded by those only who are spirit of his spirit, that is to say, by hysterical women and masculine masochists, who, with Ehrhard,[370] believe that ‘sound common-sense and optimism are the two destructive principles of all poetry’!