The Position of Ibsen

Why the Norse Dramatist Is a Victim of the Reaction Against Victorianism

A. B. WALKLEY

FROM time to time there arc sporadic attempts to revive a play or two of Ibsen. In London we have recently had holeand-corner resuscitation of A Doll's House and The Wild Duck. In New York, I believe, there have been more. I confess myself skeptical as to the importance of these experiments. Having their origin, as a rule, in the ambition of individual players or, less often, in the desperate gamble of an insolvent management, they respond to no popular demand. They are ephemeral accidents, "curios" for connoisseurs rather than plays for playgoers, and exhibitions (with appropriate ideas and dialogue) of the puffsleeves, stiff corsets, and trailing skirts of the nineties, for collectors of old fashion plates. Ibsen was a great figure and factor of what affected people used to call the fin de siecle. He is now hardly a great name. Himself the protagonist of a great reaction, he is now the victim of another, the reaction against what is called "Victorianism" (and includes not only crinolines, frock-coats and side-whiskers, but also Tennyson, Carlyle, William Morris and even Walter Pater). This is to pay him the compliment of treating him as an Englishman, whereas he was as great a European as Tolstoi or Wagner or Puvis dc Chavanncs and as fundamentally un-English as any one of the three. But, for the time being, he became so mixed up with our English life, he was the cause and the banner of so much strife, a kind of Civil War, among Englishmen, that one has got to think of him as a part of English history—and at that, nowadays, a discredited part of it. His name was the rallying-point of all the cranks and faddists in the land.

OUR propagandists of every new creed under the sun simply wallowed in him. People flocked to his plays not for the fun of the thing, not to enjoy the art of drama, but as a solemn rite, to discern a "message". There were the rival camps of "Ibsenites" and "Anti-Ibsenites", who were almost as rabid as politicians. I must not pretend to have been wiser than my neighbor. I cheerfully took service under the leadership of my friend, William Archer, the introducer and apostle of Ibsen in the Englishspeaking world, and slung much ink at Clement Scott and his satellites of the opposite party. My excuse is that I was young, or youngish— young enough at any rate to enjoy a fight for fighting's sake. But I was never an "Ibsenite" —I couldn't abide the "wild men" and still wilder women of that side—and after The Master Builder I broke away from the "Master".

Many modern historians of the "movement" are apt to represent the "Ibsenites" and the "Antis" as the equivalent of the intelligent and the stupid. As a matter of fact, it was not so. Many intellectuals were Anti. In the recently published letters of the late Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford, I light on the following passage:— "Ibsen represents very exactly all that I most dislike. The Evangelist with a wooden leg! They are praising him up to the skies now. But he won't wash. He never took delight in anything but his own mop-headed, whiskered, methodical self. I'm glad he's dead. Some good people liked his books. He caught them on their stupid side. The leavings of poor old Herbert Spencer doted on him. Now they will have to find someone else—horrid thought, can there be a third?" Elsewhere Raleigh (who seemed to be as angry with his photographs as with his works) called him "a kind of shock-headed, hard-mouthed Plymouth Brother".

You see what sticks in the Professor's throat. It is that alleged "message". Raleigh was a man of rather violent prejudices (he seems, e.g., positively to have hated Browning), and he had a racy way of writing to his friends. But his attitude to Ibsen is typical of the way in which many of the English intellectuals, especially those academically, or classically trained, took him. For him it was the Ibsenites who were the stupid party. But was there ever a party of "ites" with a corporate creed and faith that was not stupid? There is always, I daresay everywhere, a floating population of silly people who are vaguely attracted by any current fashion in things intellectual, or artistic, or quasi-philosophical, especially if flavoured with the mystic. They wear its badge in their buttonhole. It gives them a sense of personal identity, of possessing a "place in the sun", coupled with a safety in numbers. It may be that all religions movements have their origin in such crowds. They want an idol, something to kneel before in company, and the Tally of the Law handed down from an inspired source. Pilgrimages were the mediaeval satisfaction of these socialized needs. But I must not stray too far afield. Suffice it to say that these people are the abomination of I'homme sensuel moyen, whose taste and tact and sense of moderation are offended by their corybantic antics. Ibsen fell a victim to this sort of crowd. Women, mostly plain and dowdy, raved over him and chattered about their souls because they felt their bodies to be negligible. Indeed, there was hardly a pretty, well dressed woman to be found amongst the Ibsenites. Pretty women in pretty frocks had something better to do. And the men were, for the most part, solemn old pedants, or still more solemn young prigs, with a large sprinkling of those curious fifthecanthropes who (outside the Zoo, "where," if I may venture on an Americanism, "they belong") flock wherever there is a banner to wave or a drum to bang. "What a crew!" you used to mutter to yourself as you came into an audience of Ibsenites gloating over Miss Elizabeth Robins's thick-soled boots and Al penstock as she bade her old architect mount his tower in The Master Builder or to snigger at Miss Janet Achurch, sprawling on the sofa in Little Eyolf, and telling that poor creature her husband, "Your champagne was on the table, and you tasted it not!"

YES, and "What a crew!" you were often tempted to say over the queer, uncouth, ill-bred people on the stage—the gentlemen who wore frock coats (of course, with pot-hats, they would) on the most inappropriate occasions, the touzlcd disputatious women, the first and second Court Chamberlains, the Inspectors at the Baths (there was one in When We Dead Awaken, oh such a daisy!), the tipsy journalist, the whole tagrag and bobtail, who pronounced the word champagne with a thrill of excitement and shivered over a bottle of it as though conscious of committing the Sin against the Holy Ghost. "What a crew!" you muttered, but, the simple truth is, they were all plain, honest, small country-town Norwegians. The Londoners of smart society were inclined to sniff at these "impossible" foreigners ("such very odd people, my dear, where do they come from?"), and went about dismissing Ibsen as parochial or, worse, suburban. If they had called him incorrigibly provincial, they would have been nearer the mark. It was all very well about his enlarging "world-literature" and enfranchising the "human spirit"—and that he was capable of great thoughts and profound poetry I am not such a fool as to deny—but it was his misfortune to embody the thoughts and the poetry in drab, bucolic, outlandish persons. It was peculiarly his misfortune in London where an old civilization (still based, despite all modern mutations, on the aristocratic principle) is apt to be offended by the inelegant manners of a newer one. In London, Mrs. Alving was simply a good country housewife and Pastor Manders a non-conformist minister, and hardly, therefore, a gentleman, Hcdda Gabler a rather common little vixen who had never been "out" and Nora Helmer, a mere bank manager's wife. If smart society were not also a little slow in the uptake, it would have been able to pierce through these externals; but the aristocratic principle has always overestimated surfacevalues, preferred manners to meanings.

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Now, whatever else Ibsen lacked, he never lacked meaning. He gave it to you in full measure, pressed down and running over. This at the time was a surprising novelty in the theatre. It knocked the old Scribe formula, then inscribed over the portals of every playhouse, to smithereens. Scribe (and his innumerable imitators) gave you plenty of plot and no meaning. The theatre became the last refuge of empty folly and futility. Read the six volumes of Theophile Gautier on it—I won't say read Scribe, for he is unreadable—and you will be sorry for both yourself and Gautier. It was the abomination of desolation. The consequence was, people with even a minimum of intelligence lost the habit of playgoing. . . . And here was a new fellow, a mere Norwegian, actually inviting, nay, compelling you to think! Oddly enough (yet explicable from his early experiences as a theatre-manager) Ibsen himself had begun, technically, as a disciple of Scribe. He elaborated plots and lavished coincidences. But he soon broke away to become himself, and Mr. Archer finds the line of cleavage in the middle of a play —between the second and third acts of A Doll's House up to the tarantella scene the audience had had the usual thing, the conventional stageplay, but when Nora and Helmer quietly faced one another at a table to discuss tremendous questions, marriage, parenthood, the position of woman and her right to revolt, the audience sat up! When Nora slammed the front door, she may be said to have shut it on all the old drama. I do not say that the crazy old fabric was annihilated, but what you felt was, that, after Ibsen, no plays could henceforward be written in quite the same old way. They would have to mean something, to bring the interior of the play house into some relationship to the great world outside. Ibsen himself more than met the expectation. He supplied several meanings, some of them difficult enough to make your head ache, and some of them so recondite, so mystical, that the world is still puzzling over them. Why did Rosmer throw himself so docilely into the mill-race? Are we to fight the world single-handed, like the Gentleman in An Enemy of the People? Is truth-at-any-price a dangerous doctrine as Gregers Werle found in The Wild Duck? Is there any symbolic significance in the "homes for happy human beings" and the other "architectural" details of The Master Builder? Or in Mrs. Solness's "Nine Lovely Dolls"?

The time has come, the Walrus said,

to tell of many things,

As why the sea is boiling hot, and

'whether pigs have wings.

We no longer worry about Ibsen's meanings, still less about the "messages" into which they were promptly converted by the wild but now extinct tribe of Ibsenites. They serve their purpose, they raise the art of drama to a new level, far above the mere craft of yarn-spinning. They struck their blow in that unending war I spoke of last month, the great Liberation War of Humanity. This sounds ominously like an epitaph, but it is true that we need now only to consider him historically. Yet I think Walter Raleigh was wrong when he wrote "He won't wash". The answer is, that for his own time he did wash. Not that this means that his plays will, save as curiosities bear revival. Come to that, whose propaganda plays ever do? They die with the death or the satisfaction of the demands they advocate.

But Ibsen has left us one legacy that is still of high value. He brought to a new perfection a technical method as old as the Oedipus Tyrannus, and which was his chief contribution to the art of dramaturgy. I mean his retrospective method, his way of developing an action not from its beginning but from its crisis. Letting the previous history of events gradually, as it were, leak out, and then precipitating the action to a final catastrophe. The value of this method lies in the concentration of the interest, in the unity and compactness it gives to the whole work. ... I say so much out of a sense of duty. But, to be frank, Ibsen is a little too grim, too hyperborean for my personal taste. Give me the joie de vivre and the Ziegfeld Follies every time!