sen on his Merits 

 
 i
 
 a
 
 IBSEN ON HIS MEKITS.
 
 
 IBSEN ON HIS MERITS. 
 
 BY 
 
 SIR EDWARD R. RUSSELL 
 
 AND 
 
 PERCY CROSS STANDING. 
 
 " I have boldly dared to plan 
 The re-fashioning of Man." 
 
 LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD, 
 
 1897.
 
 PREFATORY. 
 
 THE "excuse " for this volume is partly to 
 be found in the recently revived interest 
 of English people in the vogue of Ibsen; 
 and partly in the fact that, with the ex- 
 ception of Mr. Bernard Shaw, practically 
 no one in this country has had courage or 
 encouragement sufficient to issue in per- 
 manent form any lengthy appreciation or 
 criticism of Dr. Ibsen's works. A portion 
 of Sir Edward Russell's contribution was 
 originally delivered in the form of a public 
 lecture, but is now carefully revised and 
 brought up to date. Much has been said 
 and written for and against the Ibsen
 
 viii Prefatory. 
 
 formula; and if the present writers have 
 occasionally delivered themselves in terms 
 of almost unrestrained enthusiasm, they 
 have not done so without having first 
 sought to reconcile the unqualified con- 
 demnation of some critics with the facts 
 as they are. It will be observed that 
 the concluding chapter, dealing with the 
 play of John Gabriel Borhnan, is jointly 
 written.
 
 PART I. 
 
 SIR EDWARD RUSSELL. 
 
 B
 
 IBSEN ON HIS MERITS. 
 
 IF the contributions of human spirits to each 
 other's enlightenment and delight are to 
 fructify to the utmost, it is much more 
 important for critics to recognize the merits 
 than to signalize the defects of great authors. 
 And when a high place has been conquered 
 in letters or art, there are few critics who 
 are entitled to pronounce positively against 
 the work by which such a position has been 
 attained. You would not suppose this from 
 much that you read. Nothing is easier than 
 to dispose of the claims of a new great man. 
 Shakespeare, Beethoven, Garrick, Darwin, 
 Wagner, Whitman, and many others have 
 with great facility been shown to be worthy
 
 4 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 of extinction ; but somehow they have not 
 gone out. Ibsen will not go out either. 
 
 In what I shall try to say about him I 
 shall try to appreciate rather than de- 
 preciate. It is a significant benevolence of 
 language that " appreciate " in its transitive 
 sense means to appraise with some degree 
 of gusto. I shall hope to assist you in 
 admiring Ibsen, without exaggerating what 
 is good and great in his works without 
 even ignoring his defects or faults. What- 
 ever else Ibsen is, he certainly is not 
 perfect. 
 
 But by what standard are we to judge 
 him ? He is a playwright. All his plays 
 even the unlikeliest have been acted. 
 Yet among us several must be considered 
 unactable, and none are truly popular. As 
 a beginning we must recognize that British 
 taste, or even British classification of plays 
 unsuitable for representation, is not of ab- 
 solute authority. For this man has caught
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 5 
 
 the ear of Europe ; has created moot points 
 of discussion which are likely enough to 
 endure for generations; has completely 
 revolutionized in important respects the tone 
 and the licence of our most serious and 
 most successful plays; has so profoundly 
 affected the conscience of society, that many 
 persons consider him a prophet rather than 
 a dramaturge. Some will say that this is 
 conclusive against him as a producer of art ; 
 but it is nothing against him as a great 
 phenomenon. 
 
 When the Senate of University College 
 did me the honour to ask me to lecture be- 
 fore them, they suggested that I should 
 choose some subject of dramatic literature. 
 So kindly a recognition of my own studies 
 came to me in the light of a command, 
 and I at once conceived a desire to furnish 
 an estimate of a writer for the stage of our 
 own time, who, though he is not perhaps ill 
 understood in the general character of his
 
 6 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 work, cannot be said to have been rightly 
 measured or placed by the English public. 
 
 Ibsen has against him almost the whole 
 theatrical profession. A few enthusiasts 
 such as Miss Eobins, Miss Marion Lea, Mr. 
 Waring, Miss Achurch, and Mr. Charring- 
 ton have yielded absolutely to his peculiar 
 charm. On the other hand, Mr. Louis 
 Calvert, I see, "has no enthusiasm for 
 Ibsen," who in his opinion " tends to 
 diminish the public stock of harmless 
 pleasure." I can only say that was not the 
 effect upon me when I saw Mr. Calvert's 
 performance of " Eosmersholm." But, as a 
 rule, actors detest what they consider 
 morbid. Their demand is for what they 
 call happy, healthy, wholesome work. They 
 always adored Dickens; they loathed to 
 see Thackeray come into a theatre. 
 Histrionic exactions, if they could be 
 gratified, would have a constant supply of 
 thoroughly pleasant, while at the same time
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 7 
 
 thoroughly able, ingenious, and original 
 plays. Anything morbid actors would far 
 rather have treated in the way of comedy 
 than seriously. Ibsen's comedy has very 
 little fun in it. It is saturnine. His serious 
 work is immensely serious. It plunges 
 with little notice into terrible psychological 
 and physiological realities. 
 
 To go about to decide how far a great 
 man is a product of his time, or how far 
 a time is the product of its great men, is 
 rather idle occupation. But it can hardly 
 be thought unnatural that in a period such 
 as ours the simpler themes should seem to 
 be exhausted, should fail to stimulate in- 
 vention ; or that more complex and twisted 
 circumstances of life should invite genius 
 to exploit them. Such ideas as evolution 
 and heredity, greater intellectual and even 
 physical sanctity in human relationships, 
 more binding and, so to speak, impersonal 
 personal obligations to public spirit and
 
 8 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 public duty, cannot come into vogue among 
 cultured mankind without giving the ob- 
 servant much to observe and the imagina- 
 tive much to imagine. Even beyond these 
 conceptions, which may be said to cover 
 the newest requirements of individual and 
 municipal life, there may come into view, 
 ushered in by fancy, strange and high-flying 
 ideals. It is a peculiarity of some forms of 
 genius to become fatigued by the common- 
 place to find even the newest lights on 
 common duty dull and wearying ; and this 
 very fatigue yields to such genius springs 
 of venturesome speculation in regions yet 
 untrodden by human experience. If this 
 is possible at any time, and probable in 
 such a time as ours, it cannot be held 
 abnormal that a great diagnoser of modern 
 moral disease, a great seer of the tendencies 
 of mankind in a world so considerably 
 changed in aspect by modern ideas, should 
 produce works of imagination which those
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 9 
 
 who attach special conventional meanings 
 to the words should not consider " happy, 
 healthy, and wholesome." Such works 
 may, however, be wholesome, though the 
 characters in them may not be wholesome. 
 They may promote happiness and health, 
 though they do not represent happiness 
 and health. The story of the Prodigal Son 
 is not a pleasant one till the last scenes, 
 and even then there is a jarring note in 
 the elder brother. There is a word in it so 
 coarse that it would scarcely now be per- 
 mitted in a leading article. I should 
 receive a number of letters telling me that 
 newspapers must lie about, and that Miss 
 Podsnap might see them. But the story 
 of the Prodigal is salutary. It has warned 
 many a lad against profligacy ; it has drawn 
 many a profligate back to purity. We may 
 not expect the serenity of such a Gospel 
 parable in the creations of a dramatist who 
 as yet is not persuaded that the good in
 
 io Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 the world has much chance of conquering 
 the evil ; but the sternness of this moralist 
 may be necessary to make us understand 
 new and old disorders, and by contrast he 
 illustrates in several of his characters a 
 nobility and poetry of goodness which have 
 been raised to the highest power by com- 
 munion with the subtle spirit of this age. 
 
 We may say all this and more, and yet 
 not have begun to criticize Ibsen as a play- 
 wright. Indeed, the question of standard 
 is apt to be embarrassing. One person 
 says, " What does it teach?" Another 
 says, " If it purposely teaches anything it 
 is all wrong in art." One cries, "What is 
 his message ? " Another cries, " If he has 
 any message at all he is no dramatist." 
 Now Ibsen always has a message, though 
 different people may read it differently ; 
 and he is always a dramatist, though often 
 crude and provincial and juvenile in his 
 methods. The best thing we can do in
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 1 1 
 
 such cases is to eschew canons and recog- 
 nize facts. Ibsen's art is chiefly power. 
 His secret is chiefly grip. He is the more 
 notable, therefore, as an effective dramatist, 
 because he is independent of the con- 
 struction, the probability, the polish, the 
 dialogue of playwrights more expert in the 
 niceties of their craft. The experience of 
 most people is that they begin to read or 
 see a play of Ibsen with curiosity; that 
 they presently smile at its puerilities ; that 
 they expect to be bored by his dramatis 
 personw ; that as they advance they wonder 
 how so provincial a man could ever get so 
 European a reputation ; but that suddenly, 
 just as they are going to yawn, they are as 
 it were struck to the very centre by some 
 strong, penetrating, pregnant suggestion of 
 character or problem which seems to curdle 
 the sensibilities. From that moment the 
 author has them at his mercy. His grip 
 never relaxes until his design is worked
 
 12 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 out. His faults and awkwardnesses matter 
 not. The reader or spectator submits tq 
 the Ibsen spell. 
 
 I am often asked if the plays act well. 
 So far as I know, surprisingly well. I 
 have seen only three A Doll's House, 
 Hedda Gabler, and Rosmersholm. I had 
 read each of them before seeing them 
 " a thing I do not hold with," as 
 Arthur Sketchley's Mrs. Brown used to 
 say. Yet I found the action freshly and 
 unexpectedly engrossing ; the dialogue 
 astonishingly piquant, considering that it 
 was essentially colloquial and ordinary ; 
 and, as far as I could judge, the sudden 
 passages where the grip comes must have 
 been as startling and remorseless in their 
 seizure of the first-time auditor as I had 
 found them in reading, and now found 
 them again upon the stage. I long to 
 see Ghosts, and The Wild Duck, and The 
 Master - Builder, as crucial examples of
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 13 
 
 Ibsen's peculiar power of surmounting, 
 perhaps mounting by, his own deficien- 
 cies, which is, taken along with all the 
 circumstances, the most curious pheno- 
 menon of dramaturgy which has come under 
 my observation. 
 
 He never minds the laugh being against 
 himself. In this he stands absolutely 
 alone among dramatists. The first thing 
 a playwright learns after he gets his start 
 is to be a playwright that is, to be a 
 craftsman whom no one will make ashamed. 
 He winces as he writes at the thought 
 of any of his characters saying or doing 
 anything which will provoke the stage 
 manager, or the actors, or a sniffing critic, 
 or a shrewd man in the pit or gallery 
 to ridicule or sneer, or the lifting of 
 the eyebrows of contempt. There is in- 
 deed one popular and powerful dramatist 
 of our own stage who has a little of 
 the awkward youth which we perceive
 
 14 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 perpetually in Ibsen, and which Ibsen will 
 never grow out of. I mean Mr. Henry 
 Arthur Jones; and in this respect the 
 best of his play-writing is a remarkable 
 contrast to the always adult work of 
 Mr. Pinero. But if Mr. Jones is young, 
 Ibsen is infantile. Yet Ibsen's aims and 
 ideas are more searching and far-reaching 
 than those of either of these authors, 
 and but for Ibsen the most striking of 
 their dramas would never have been con- 
 ceived. 
 
 Let me lead you up or down to one 
 instance of this strange and unexampled 
 flaw, which must be considered to belong 
 to his genius, because inseparable from it 
 and characteristic of the man, though seem- 
 ingly the reverse of contributory to any- 
 thing great and valuable which his genius 
 produces. The story of Hedda Gabler 
 is a peculiar one even for Ibsen. She is 
 the newly married wife, aged twenty-nine,
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 15 
 
 of a zealous, ambitious, good-natured pro- 
 fessor, who thinks himself most fortunate 
 in having won her, but expects nothing 
 particular to happen ; is as towards women 
 and the feminine nature quite shallow and 
 casual and honest ; fresh and pleasant and 
 interesting within his limits ; the very man 
 to be easily happy with a healthy, agreeable, 
 and ordinarily intelligent wife ; not at all 
 likely to be very much occupied by her, or 
 to notice anything peculiar in her, unless it 
 is forced upon him. He assumes that she 
 will be healthy, agreeable, intelligent, and 
 hospitable, and keeps his eyes alertly on his 
 professional work, even during their honey- 
 moon. In this particular case the play 
 begins, not ill and clumsily, but well and 
 with great art. The arrival of the young 
 couple at their home, the characters of the 
 professor's aunt and old servant, the non- 
 accommodation of the wife to her new 
 surroundings, and the fussy content of the
 
 1 6 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 husband, who is wholly without misgivings, 
 are sketched with vivid skill. As a matter of 
 fact, the good homely young man of letters 
 might as well have brought Cleopatra home. 
 Hedda, dignified and distinguished, of 
 pallid beauty, with steel-grey eyes having 
 a cold open expression of serenity, the hair 
 an agreeable brown of medium tint, but not 
 very thick for Ibsen never leaves you in 
 doubt on points of personality is an in- 
 carnation of reckless selfish ambition, and 
 of an insatiable appetite for a fascinating 
 mastery over a certain type of men. To 
 this type her husband does not belong. She 
 has married "because she had danced till 
 she was tired," and because she counts on 
 show and position. In the ordinary sense 
 she is not a woman of passion. Ibsen's 
 women seldom are in that signification 
 passionate; and, indeed, most of his men 
 take their love rather quietly, and are either 
 commonplace (as Tesman) or exhausted
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 17 
 
 volcanoes (as Judge Brack and Dr. 
 Eank), or beings whom it is difficult 
 to ignite except with very peculiar fire 
 (as Eosmersholm). If one may judge 
 from Ibsen, drink, literature, wastrelism, 
 and eccentric ideals have a great deal 
 more to do with masculine adventures 
 in Scandinavia than have the desires 
 and fancies which, in the rest of Europe, 
 produce most of the life-dramas ; while 
 ideals, pure and simple, are the motive 
 power of dramatic conduct among good and 
 bad Norse women alike. There is usually 
 in Ibsen's plays some symbol such as the 
 home and social life which Tesman and 
 Hedda have dreamed of to typify, by 
 allusions to it under various aspects of the 
 action, the moral situation; and there is 
 often a ne'er-do-well usually a man of real 
 ability gone wrong to preach or point a 
 moral. In Hedda Gabler the ne'er-do-well 
 has begun to do well again, but a fine 
 
 c
 
 1 8 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 situation is created by his being a com- 
 petitor with Hedda's husband for fame 
 and place, being also a lover of hers 
 in former days, and now in comradeship 
 with another woman who worships and 
 is saving him by keeping him off drink. 
 It is Hedda's aim to have courage 
 "to live her life" caring not at all that 
 her life should be good, and true, and 
 humane. By her mastery over Lov- 
 borg, the weak though brilliant rival of 
 her husband in literature, she pushes him 
 back into alcohol and disgrace, and by 
 contrivance obtains the manuscript of the 
 book which is to crown his fame, and burns 
 it before the audience in a stove. The 
 drama is thus advancing to a truly remark- 
 able denouement. Hedda Tesman, finding 
 that after all her whimsical villainy is not 
 prospering quite according to her peculiar 
 mind, resolves to shoot herself behind a 
 curtain. This is not in any way announced
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 19 
 
 beforehand, though she has toyed with 
 pistols, but, Lovborg having shot himself, 
 she praises him for "having had the courage 
 to do what had to be done." She regards 
 this as an act of voluntary courage, which 
 she is glad to find still possible in the 
 world " something over which there falls 
 a veil of unintentional beauty." "Force 
 and will enough to break away from the 
 banquet of life so early" is, in her judg- 
 ment, admirable and enviable. Her ideal 
 fails her afterwards, because the man has 
 shot himself in a scene of ill-resort, and in 
 the abdomen instead of in the breast. 
 " Oh, what a curse of ridicule and vulgarity 
 hangs over everything if only she touches 
 it ! " The crisis arrives when it becomes 
 known to her that it was with her pistol, 
 suggestively lent to him by her, that 
 Lovborg shot himself, and that Judge 
 Brack, who had been forcing an intimate 
 friendship on her, holds this fact in tcrrorem
 
 2o Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 over her. Then after various touches of keen 
 comedy aimed at each of the personages 
 in the domestic scene, she passes behind 
 a curtain, and even in the act of lightly 
 conversing with the others, " lives her 
 life," as she would say, by ending it. The 
 fatal shot is heard; her innocent husband 
 exclaims, after his manner, that she is 
 playing with her father's pistols again; 
 the catastrophe is discovered; Hedda lies 
 dead ; the roue judge, who has been carry- 
 ing on a sort of toy-temptation with her, 
 sinks half fainting in a chair. " May 
 God take pity on us ! " he cries. " People 
 don't do such things." 
 
 Whether they " do such things" or not, 
 the picture presented throughout this 
 most dramatic play of a home perverted 
 from its happiness and innocence by wild 
 vagaries of diseased individualism is most 
 powerfully conceived and is of intensely 
 true moral application in many ways, as
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 21 
 
 might easily be shown were citation pos- 
 sible. I know of nothing stronger or truer 
 in its essentials to life. But with a careless 
 indifference to the right choice of expe- 
 dients, which, if Ibsen were not an old 
 and practised hand we should have to call 
 juvenile awkwardness, the great shock which 
 ends the play is preceded by the wholly 
 unnecessary absurdity of Hedda's husband 
 and Lovborg's lady-comrade sitting down 
 suddenly with the notes of Lovborg's 
 destroyed work, and beginning then and 
 there before the audience to reproduce it. 
 This seems absurd in the telling ; it is 
 absolutely ludicrous in the acting; and 
 might quite easily have been avoided. 
 Excellent and poignant effects are made 
 by Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted being 
 engaged together in reference to the 
 book. They might even be glancing at 
 and sampling the materials which Mrs. 
 Elvsted has preserved. But to actually
 
 22 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 go to work at a moment's notice upon a 
 literary task which is to last them months 
 is to risk by a needless absurdity the whole 
 force of the climax of the play. 
 
 Ibsen's work abounds in such absurdities 
 and lends itself to burlesque. One only 
 has to pass into a Philistine mood, and, 
 without being much of a wit, one may 
 extract from these plays plenty of rough 
 amusement. Admirers of Ibsen should take 
 quite kindly all parodies and caricatures 
 of the master. Mr. Anstey's humorous 
 versions of several of the plays may be read 
 by those who appreciate Ibsen with a frank 
 enjoyment proportioned to their apprecia- 
 tion of the great dramatist's power. They 
 know that, though shallow critics may, 
 after their kind, fasten on improbabilities 
 and careless eccentricities as if these were 
 the main features of Ibsen's work, the 
 electric hold that he gains upon all who 
 read or see his plays is all the stronger
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 23 
 
 proof of his greatness because of the 
 phenomenal drawbacks which his utter 
 indifference to minor likelihood has encum- 
 bered him withal. 
 
 Nor is it always minor unlikelihood only 
 by which Ibsen is handicapped. Essential, 
 pervading, substantial improbability is 
 upon occasion braved with a courage as 
 unfaltering or an indifference as profound. 
 Nothing can give dramatic work an air 
 of greater unreality nothing may be 
 expected so decidedly to alienate the 
 average playgoer as such a crude mixture 
 of the real and the symbolical as is to be 
 found in The Master- Builder. You never 
 know how much of it you must take for 
 parable ; how much for frenzied hyper- 
 bole utterly out of place, according to 
 ordinary canons, in a presentation of real 
 life; how much if any for emblem of 
 some unstated moral condition. Yet I 
 confess that this Master- Builder obtained
 
 24 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 over me a mastery which seemed to be 
 that of exuberant moral power ; and I have 
 had testimony from persons wholly devoid 
 of literary, much less of Ibsen predilection, 
 that in seeing the piece wholly without 
 preparation or anticipation they have been 
 grasped as in a vice. One man said to me, 
 as I have stated publicly before, " I felt 
 while seeing The Master- Builder as if every 
 mean thing or thought I had ever been 
 guilty of was being bitterly summoned to 
 my memory." 
 
 Now, this is no praise of a play in the 
 estimation of such a critic as now sits in 
 the seat of the great John Oxenford of the 
 Times. An amusing piece of well-managed 
 nonsense was lately produced in London, 
 and the leading journal congratulated the 
 management not only on having produced 
 an entertaining farcical comedy, but on 
 having restored the stage to its proper 
 function. I don't know how far I shall
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 25 
 
 carry the reader with me, but I am of 
 opinion that frivolous amusement has of 
 late made most undesirable encroachments, 
 not only on the stage, but in many other 
 departments. 
 
 There is no probability of plays of the 
 Ibsen type becoming too numerous. Few 
 can write them ; few care to see them ; it 
 must be admitted that their subjects are 
 morbid, and that if they pretended to " see 
 life whole " their point of view would be 
 pessimistic. But the morbid element in 
 life is far-reaching ; is productive in life of 
 the most dramatic events; enters con- 
 sciously or unconsciously into much human 
 experience ; is subtly connected in all but 
 those whose sanity is least sensitive with 
 many of our keenest and most prevalent 
 feelings ; is liable greatly to affect us in the 
 dearest and closest relations ; is amenable 
 very considerably to the will when properly 
 understood ; and is, therefore, well worthy of
 
 26 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 being to a certain extent studied, whether 
 as a mere field of intelligent investigation 
 or as a stimulus and corrective of the moral 
 consciousness. 
 
 Upon many the result of reading or seeing 
 Ibsen is the awakening of conscience by the 
 contemplation of morbid mental anatomy. 
 And morbid mental anatomy, as he with a 
 strange fascination displays it, is related in 
 turn to various obligations of mind and 
 body, of domestic, social, civic, patriotic, 
 and spiritual bearings, all of vast importance 
 to individual and social life. 
 
 I am not prepared to discuss whether it 
 is permissible for Art to use morbid anatomy 
 or physiology thus. I move the previous 
 question : If the art is great, should it be 
 challenged ? For my part I demur to 
 canons, whether reasoned or arbitrary, 
 which would reject or exclude any great 
 product of imagination or insight. 
 
 The Master-Builder is an architect
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 27 
 
 provincial and middle class, as Ibsen's 
 characters usually are who is engaged in 
 the building business. For reasons of the 
 drama the author has combined, with Hal- 
 vard Solness's remarkable ambition and 
 success in his calling, a mystical aim which 
 has at length taken form in certain designs 
 for the creation of perfect homes and a 
 project for the erection of a gigantic tower. 
 The confident and careless manipulation of 
 this curious compost of reality and trans- 
 cendental, heady intention is among the 
 most childish work probably the most 
 childish that Ibsen has ever done ; but it 
 is associated with and is the mere frame 
 and canvas for a rare picture of selfish 
 irresponsibility. This worthy, commonplace, 
 provincial architect, Solness, becomes the 
 type of a character abundant enough, it is 
 to be feared ; one wholly given up to the 
 interests and the fancies of self, and a 
 prey to any delusion or deluder that can
 
 28 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 intoxicate his personality; but possessing 
 also a remarkable appropriating fascination 
 over others. He comes under the power of 
 others and exercises power over others in 
 this particular being much more real than 
 the autocratic and melodramatic personages, 
 such as George Eliot's Grandcourt, who 
 usually rule the roast in fiction. The rise 
 and progress of a junior architect depraves 
 by jealousy and dishonest self-preservation 
 Solness's mind, which once was noble 
 and generous. His neglect and hood- 
 winking of a good wife reveals the callous- 
 ness which egotism has grown in him. His 
 duplicity and sensuousness in dealing with 
 a young female relative, who is his clerk, 
 are all the baser because he accommodates 
 them to his interests and subordinates them 
 to the wild and wayward influence gained 
 over him by the eccentric heroine of the 
 play. This is a young woman named Hilda 
 Wangel, previously known to students of
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 29 
 
 the plays, having heen seen as quite a 
 girl in The Lady from the Sea. There she 
 exhibited a precocious appetite for what is 
 " thrilling," and got into her head a fancy 
 which becomes the catchword of the later 
 play. In The Master-Builder it becomes 
 evident that this fancy has grown with her 
 growth and strengthened with her strength 
 which is now, in spite of her flightiness, 
 considerable. Entering the domestic circle 
 of the Solnesses, fascinating the wife and 
 fascinating the husband, who in a casual 
 way, thinking nothing about it, had 
 fascinated her when she was little more 
 than a child, and created in her the fancy 
 key-note of which I have spoken, she at 
 once dominates the interior, though guilty 
 of the absurdest vagaries perhaps because 
 of them ; feeds full and at the same time 
 piques and titillates the vanity, the enjoy- 
 ing faculty, the vein of unscrupulousness 
 and the wild ambition of the Master-
 
 30 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Builder, whose moral sanity is entirely 
 gone, and brings about an actual tragic 
 crisis when, climbing to the summit of his 
 Babel-tower, he reels and is precipitated 
 headlong to the earth. 
 
 The meaning of all this is surely clear 
 enough. I neither insist upon the pos- 
 sibility of the incidents nor attempt to 
 transmute them into allegory. I let myself 
 go with the author, and I think I see pretty 
 well all he wishes me to see, and find it 
 powerful, absorbing, typical of whole regions 
 of human life. I admit that Ibsen might 
 have told the same grim, wayward, moral 
 story in terms of actual life. I allow that 
 a dramatist takes a great risk if he does 
 not restrict himself to things that might 
 happen not necessarily in his collocation 
 of them, but being possible separate occur- 
 rences, permissible for him to combine and 
 to heighten for stage purposes by language 
 and action, and to elucidate by soliloquy.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 31 
 
 In the modifications of reality which are 
 thus made for dramatic purposes, the play- 
 writer must feel in advance the pulse of 
 his audience, and may extend very indefi- 
 nitely the limits of the supposed possible. 
 But if he disregards the element of 
 possibility of incident, and hovers between 
 the purely fanciful and the seemingly 
 emblematic, he must face extraordinary 
 difficulties. It is well that Ibsen faced 
 these difficulties, and he has surmounted 
 them. The ethical effect of The Master- 
 Builder is far greater than would have 
 been the effect of the plot and characters 
 if they had been more prosaically settled 
 and moulded into forms of probable and 
 consistent incident. 
 
 And besides this there may' become appa- 
 rent to one in reading this play something 
 of the method in which Ibsen works. My 
 suggestion is that, setting out with an in- 
 tention to make his play collectively didactic,
 
 32 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 he leaves to chance and fancy whether he 
 is didactic in passing ; that he scorns the 
 idea of concrete probability so long as his 
 moral abstractions and physiological per- 
 ceivings are true ; and that in writing he 
 gets into a condition of exaltation, the work 
 done in which would be revised out of 
 existence, or into comparative insipidity, 
 by a more timid or fastidious author, but 
 is left by him untouched when once it has 
 passed from his brain to paper. 
 
 Self always bulks largely in Ibsen's work 
 not the dramatist's self but the selves 
 of his characters. It is as introspective 
 as Carlyle desired that we all should not 
 be. Another instance of this peculiarity 
 is Peer Gynt, which, though a poem, is 
 a more vulgar Master-Builder. Peer Gynt 
 has, I believe, been acted both lately and 
 twenty years ago, and Grieg supplied music 
 for a recent representation. Presumably, 
 however, it was not written for the stage.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 33 
 
 It sets out from an atmosphere of Scan- 
 dinavian folk-lore ; and returns at its 
 close pretty nearly to the same sur- 
 roundings. I have no knowledge of the 
 original, to enable me to judge of the 
 composition as a poem, but my instinct 
 is that the translation by the Messrs. 
 Archer gives a fair idea of it. Another of 
 my disqualifications is if I may trouble you 
 with my personal equation that I am 
 constitutionally incapable of greatly enjoy- 
 ing folk-lore for its own sake or when it 
 yields succulence only from a husk of 
 crude narrative, which may or may not 
 be symbolical. Ibsen is said to have 
 obtained the local colour of Peer Gynt 
 and Brand, when commissioned by the 
 Norwegian Government to collect songs 
 and legends at Eomsdal and Sondmore. 
 The results are not attractive to me. But 
 the translators suggest that "the sheer 
 interest, the pure poetry of the thing," 
 
 D
 
 34 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 should carry the reader past all obscurities, 
 and that the poem should " bite upon the 
 mind." Its right to be accounted as " upon 
 the summits of literature" consists, they 
 say, in its "meaning so much more than the 
 poet consciously intended." " One of the 
 characteristics of a masterpiece,' 7 they add, 
 is " that every one can read into ifc his own 
 secret." This privilege of the masterpiece 
 has certainly been pushed to an extreme 
 in Peer Gynt, but I admit that the work 
 does carry even an unsympathetic reader 
 along, and that the secret I read into it 
 if I read any secret into it is the fatuity 
 and criminality of self-delusion when it 
 takes the form of opinionative, unscrupulous 
 self-indulgence. Peer Gynt, though he 
 begins as the companion of trolls, and 
 involves himself half in truth, half in brag, 
 with all sorts of weird Norwegian legendry, 
 careers through the world in the subsequent 
 tableaux of his life with the manners of
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 35 
 
 a bagman and the morals of a charlatan; 
 making money by commercial immoralities, 
 accepting any other immoralities that turn 
 up for his delectation, evading the truth 
 about himself with consummate Philistine 
 audacity, committing the most base cruel- 
 ties without a suspicion of remorse for 
 absolutely selfish reasons, but all the time 
 imagining that he is in some special degree 
 a favourite of Heaven, and that there will 
 be something very wrong if at last he is 
 not as fortunate with the Judge of all the 
 earth as he has been in all the wild trans- 
 actions of his life. His catchword is that 
 a man should be himself. Throughout the 
 action this is a mere synonym for indulging 
 himself. The scenes unlinked by con- 
 secutive story where they have apparent 
 meaning are a study of ill-educated, un- 
 disciplined, optimist egotism. So under- 
 stood, the crude drama hits hard at foibles 
 that lie deep in many characters, as well
 
 36 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 as floating on the surface, but one can 
 scarcely help feeling that the effect would 
 have been greater if the work had been 
 more coherent. There is a half-comic, half- 
 sensuous episode in which Peer Gynt, in 
 the most flagrant disguise of transparent 
 imposture, figures as an Oriental prophet, 
 and attaches to himself, or attaches himself 
 to, a sly desert maiden, who eventually 
 runs off with his valuables and leaves him 
 stranded in a Sahara. There is a serious 
 episode in which a priest delivers a very 
 original funeral sermon on a man who as a 
 boy chopped a finger off in order to escape 
 conscription : 
 
 " No patriot was he. Both for Church and State 
 A fruitless tree. But there on the upland ridge, 
 In the small circle where he saw his calling, 
 There lie was great because he was himself. 
 His inborn note rang true unto the end. 
 His days were as a lute with muted strings. 
 And, therefore, peace be with thee, silent warrior, 
 That fought the peasant's little fight, and fell.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 37 
 
 It is not ours to search the heart and reins, 
 That is no task for dust, but for its ruler. 
 Yet dare I freely, firmly speak my hope, 
 He scarce stands crippled now before his God." 
 
 But this passage is every way far above 
 almost everything else in Peer G-ynt. 
 
 There is much talk of the vigour and 
 earnestness that go to a sin. There is 
 much discussion and illustration all 
 whimsical of what it is to be yourself, 
 a topic full in its essence, in Peer 
 Gynt's opinion, of edification. There 
 are absolutely inane colloquies designed 
 to bring out Peer Gynt's self-sufficient, 
 empty character, but sinking for the pur- 
 pose to a very poor literary level. There 
 is a coarse and frolicsome comparison of 
 a philosopher to a tom-cat. There is a 
 really striking and Carlylean simile of an 
 onion all swathings and no centre as 
 an illustration of how the central core 
 of some human character eludes the search
 
 38 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 ending with the sardonic comment, 
 "Nature is witty/' After a series of ill- 
 conducted repetitions of a feeble spiritual 
 conundrum, in the solution of which Peer 
 Gynt is to find a respite from death, 
 the end comes in a piece of curiously 
 meaningless sentiment, a woman to whom 
 he has never been properly attached re- 
 vealing to him that he has always been 
 "himself, the whole man, the true man" 
 " in her faith, in her hope, and in her 
 love." Obviously this is no answer to any 
 question that Peer Gynt's bizarre career 
 may have raised. But the production is 
 in no sense one to be dealt with seriously 
 as a concatenation or as a whole. It has 
 interesting and even telling moments. It 
 has humour, though very clumsy humour. 
 It is strongly saved from the aimlessness 
 of mere whim by the uncompromising 
 presentation in many phases of an un- 
 scrupulous vulgarian with a feeble turn
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 39 
 
 for self-introspection. But there is no 
 real problem, no real answer, no real 
 theorem, no real thesis, no refined ex- 
 cellence. I cannot allow that Peer Grynt 
 is on the summits of literature at all. 
 
 Brand Ibsen's other dramatic poem 
 is a very different matter. This is serious, 
 without any attempt at humour. The 
 metre in the original Norwegian is noble. 
 The diction is eloquent. The action is 
 impressive. Here we are among ideals, 
 and all other ideals bow down before 
 one which is supreme the ideal of 
 self-surrender, for which the motto or 
 catchword is, "All or nothing." We 
 have no reason to conclude that this is 
 the poet's personal ideal in ethics or 
 religion. At all events, I hold it to be 
 an indefensible one. There is no virtue 
 in self-renunciation per se. Martyrdom 
 must sometimes be obligatory, but there 
 is no reason why martyrs should be life-
 
 40 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 long anchorites or self-torturers. The 
 martyr-spirit, when called forth by exi- 
 gencies of duty, is sublime in itself. But 
 it is a matter of course to the true martyr. 
 If martyrdom were cultivated for its own 
 sake, or even as the one essential thing 
 to be sought for the good of others, it 
 would become a mere morbid will-worship. 
 A constant insistence upon self-surrender 
 as essential to please God is, however, 
 an ideal capable of creating a great story 
 if not a great drama. Ibsen has so 
 treated it that, whether renunciation is a 
 good ideal or not, its exemplar Brand 
 is an immortal creation. Sombre, stern, 
 forbidding, unsympathetic ; but true with a 
 cruel truth to the rigid and frigid doctrine 
 to which his whole being is pledged. 
 The subject is pursued with most pathetic 
 details. 
 
 In much that is called pessimism in 
 Ibsen he does well to be angry. His
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 41 
 
 feeling is indignation at the unsatisfactori- 
 ness of human motives and conduct. The 
 average " wholesome " playwright as he 
 is called concentrates the villainy or the 
 unsatisfactoriness in one or two characters, 
 and flatters humanity in the others by ex- 
 hibiting a number of personages well-mean- 
 ing and on the whole not repugnant. This 
 method rises in the greatest poets and 
 creators into very high regions of excellence. 
 It is the way of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, 
 of Goethe, of Scott, of Dickens, of George 
 Eliot, of Bulwer, and of Charles Eeade. 
 It is not the way of Ibsen. He is for lay- 
 ing bare and abrading the weakness and 
 errors of all, and administers scarifying 
 treatment to foibles as well as to vices. 
 
 I have said how largely self is examined 
 and probed in his works. Here is a search- 
 ing and scathing passage from Brand, 
 in which what I may call the selfishness 
 of many ordinary people, grimly and
 
 42 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 awkwardly caricatured in Peer Gtynt, is 
 solemnly chidden 
 
 " Joy makes flaw in no breast. Grant that you 
 are a slave to mirth, only be one from one day's 
 end to another. Do not be one thing one day or 
 one year, and something else the next. Whatever 
 you are, be that wholly and entirely, and not by 
 bits, piecemeal. The Bacchant is a distinct idea ; 
 a toper its failure. Silenus is a picturesque figure ; 
 a drunkard his caricature. Only go about this 
 country and observe each man, and you will see 
 that every one has learnt to be a little of every- 
 thing. He retains a little veil of seriousness for 
 Sunday use, a little adherence to the customs of 
 his fathers, a little pruriency after supper for 
 that was the same with his fathers a little warm- 
 heartedness when there is merry-making, and he 
 hears songs about the little 'rock-fast rock-folk' 
 who have never borne stick or bludgeon, a little 
 lavish as far as promises go, and a little hair- 
 splitting when he soberly discusses the promise he 
 gave at a feast for fulfilment on the day of crisis. 
 But all, as I say, only quite a little ; his failure, 
 his superiority, do not go far ; he is a fraction in 
 great and in small, a fraction in evil and a fraction 
 in good ; but the worst of it is, every factor of the 
 fraction utterly vitiates all the rest."
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 43 
 
 This reveals only one of the least im- 
 portant of the poet's many ideals. But it 
 is significant of the desire he always has 
 that men should " see to the nethermost 
 depth of each of their deeds." His ideals 
 are not new that cannot be expected ; but 
 they are trumpet-toned expressions of good 
 old ideals and that is what frail beings in 
 search of moral strength and tightness do 
 well to desire. Nor is anything to the 
 contrary expressed when you have said 
 " hackneyed," " fanciful," " priggish," 
 " exaggerated." There is a happy per- 
 cussive impact of the minor Brand ideals 
 on the reader's mind which shows that 
 they are not hackneyed. " Fanciful " 
 merely means " unfamiliar," and the objec- 
 tion should be got over by meditation. 
 "Priggish" is a mere protest of frivolous 
 irresponsibility. Exaggeration uncon- 
 scious in a great poet is, within the limits 
 of artistic judgment, a great weapon which
 
 44 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 imagination places in his hands for moral 
 purposes. God knows we need ideals to 
 raise us into higher tones of life ; and these 
 negatively or positively, in the spiritual, in 
 the domestic, in every life-region, Ibsen 
 gives us. That scourging may be better 
 than quietude ; that national necessity 
 should breed heroism, or a people is not 
 worthy of redemption the real need of 
 the man who cannot live and dare not die ; 
 the value of knowing your work ; the 
 noble love-thought that so far from love 
 weakening the sense of duty, there should 
 come " a world-wide sea, with scourge of 
 gale and rush of currents " between any 
 two lovers, if one makes of love an excuse 
 for ignobly shirking supreme obligations of 
 life; that faith is likely enough to be of 
 good quality in proportion as it is uncon- 
 ventional ; that true sight is " light and 
 wings" to a man; that the image of God 
 which we have stained may rise again in
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 45 
 
 us "washed by the will;" the doubtful 
 and needing to be qualified, yet important 
 ideal that " we should live the life we know 
 we can ; " that, on the other hand, stress 
 and strain are invaluable; that God's love 
 is neither weak nor mild, and that (very 
 daringly said) He was not humane to His 
 Son Jesus Christ ; that a road is still 
 needed between life and religion, those at 
 present existing being mere " confusion of 
 everything between a dark lantern and 
 northern lights;" these are all concep- 
 tions such as a great poet earns gratitude 
 by presenting to our sympathies and 
 thoughts. 
 
 But I have distinguished between the 
 subsidiary ideals and the paramount ideal 
 of this poem-play. Where the author 
 becomes most powerful over our sense of 
 awe where he fills us with gloom where 
 he harrows us, as in the scene in which the 
 pastor's wife is compelled in mere self-
 
 46 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 mortification to surrender every single gar- 
 ment and toy associated with her dead 
 child, on the stern principle, "All or 
 nothing " the ground of sanity has been 
 departed from ; the story is the tragedy of 
 a possessed fanatic. The good purpose in 
 Brand's life is strangled by his preoccu- 
 pation with self-surrender. His reason is 
 vitiated by a gloomy absorption in self- 
 denial as an aim good in itself. Heightened 
 by restrained and classic word-painting in 
 every noble scenic possibility germane to 
 the theme deepened by every expedient 
 of heart-rending experience adorned in 
 the character of Agnes with one of the 
 sweetest and noblest figures in poetry 
 disfigured only by certain poor polemical 
 parodies of " Humanitarianism," which 
 seem to refer to old provincial controver- 
 sies Brand is undoubtedly one of the 
 greatest works of ethical imagination that 
 the world has ever seen. It contains in
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 47 
 
 the following sentence wholly away from 
 the spirit of the book one of the loveliest 
 things ever said by a husband to his wife. 
 It is of their child that Brand is speaking 
 to Agnes : "Go and watch him while he 
 sleeps. Sing him into bright dreams. A 
 child's soul is as clear and placid as a tarn 
 in the summer sunshine. A mother can 
 hover over it like a bird, which, on its 
 silent flight, mirrors her beauty in its 
 deepest depths." 
 
 We have said nothing as yet of that 
 exaction of intellectual affinity in conjugal 
 life which seems to be a fair inference from 
 some of the most interesting of Ibsen's 
 prose plays, and which as he treats it is 
 almost as unrealizable an ideal as his "All 
 or nothing" in the relations between man 
 and God. It is in this, rather than in the 
 great religious drama of which I have just 
 spoken in this, and in his firm and penal 
 exposure of the hereditary consequences,
 
 48 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 physiological and moral, of ill-governed life 
 that he has gained, or almost gained, the 
 character of a prophet. Here again we 
 come upon a theme of vast extent and 
 this time it is a theme which cannot be 
 systematically discussed. If we may judge 
 by the literature of many countries, there 
 are a great many uncomprehended wives 
 in the world, who are apt, in the language 
 of the old Methodist hymn, to " fill their 
 fellow-creatures' ears with the sad tales of 
 all their woes ; " and there may be some 
 uncomprehended husbands, though they are 
 less vocal and communicative. The husband 
 supposes himself to be uncomprehended in 
 Ibsen's play of Rosmersholm, assisted by 
 the very-much-emancipated endeavours of 
 Miss West. The wife knows herself to 
 be uncomprehended in A Doll's House. 
 The whole subject is sublimated into a 
 condition of hyper-ethereality in A Lady 
 from the Sea. No one can deny that,
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 49 
 
 though such connubial failures have their 
 ridiculous and fussy side, they are a serious 
 factor of human misery. It is misery of 
 a peculiarly acute and wearing kind. It 
 falls mainly on persons especially unable to 
 bear mental pain. It diminishes not only 
 the happiness of homes, but their utility in 
 the scheme of human life. Apart from all 
 this, though the study may be a morbid 
 one, there is no aspect of the great ever- 
 lasting problem of He and She which 
 supplies more interesting matters of con- 
 templation. In objection to such illustra- 
 tions in a dramatic form it may be demurred 
 that to exacerbate the idea of deficient 
 affinity in married life will tend to induce 
 people who are unequally yoked to make 
 the worst of their situation instead of the 
 best. And if we are to judge Ibsen 
 moralistic ally, it must be confessed that 
 the duty of making the best of mar- 
 riage, which must stand very high in any 
 
 E
 
 50 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 practical Christian code, under the exist- 
 ing theory of the marriage connection, 
 appears never to enter his mind. Indeed, 
 he never teaches duty at all in the 
 matter. His characters follow their own 
 sweet, or unsweet wills, with little restraint 
 even from circumstances. The extremely 
 interesting developments of the subject 
 which he achieves are sufficiently absorbing 
 to justify the dramatist as an artist. If he 
 is a witness to fact, the result of his testi- 
 mony is that those who submit to the want 
 of affinity at home and those who seek for 
 affinity abroad are about equally miserable. 
 
 Some will see in these statements suffi- 
 cient ground for condemning Ibsen's plays 
 of this class. But I adhere to my principle 
 that, where work is great, you ought not 
 to ostracize it, and indeed cannot. A 
 dramatist is no more bound to satisfy you 
 and me with the moralistic tendencies of 
 his plays than is a poet to satisfy you and
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 51 
 
 me with his ideals. Are these marriage - 
 plays important able ? do they reveal 
 striking aspects of life ? have they in them 
 the quality to become classic ? are the 
 scenes they depict such as will be remem- 
 bered ? 
 
 But this is putting the defence of Ibsen 
 very low. The net result of his marriage - 
 plays is a demand for more real, more 
 refined, more soul-satisfying compatibility 
 between husbands and wives. It is a large 
 subject, and one not convenient or even 
 ripe for public discussion. This, however, 
 may be positively said Anything that tends 
 to a discreet choice, apart from mere unde- 
 finable liking or fancy, will improve the 
 average of marriages. Much at the last 
 must depend on chance, but chance should 
 be eliminated as far as possible. Both 
 sexes have been much to blame, and even 
 where there has been much mutual accom- 
 modation after marriage, it has often been
 
 52 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 not quite in the best spirit, or with 
 adequate tact, or with anything like the 
 resource that is found in dealing with 
 other exigencies of life. The need of a 
 better and more intellectual companionship 
 no new lesson, for it has been as con- 
 tinuously taught as, in the choice of 
 partners, it has been frequently disregarded 
 was one that needed to be taught in a new 
 way, so as to make the possibilities as well 
 as the impossibilities of marriage a living 
 theme of thought and speech. It has 
 certainly in Ibsen's hands gravely affected 
 European, and especially British opinion. 
 Alike in the beginning and in the con- 
 tinuance let us hope very seldom in the 
 ending of the marriage relationship, much 
 of this part of Ibsen's work is instructive as 
 well as vivid. The best thing we can hope 
 is that it will instruct the right people in 
 the right way. May I say thus publicly 
 that I have heard things of young couples
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 53 
 
 since Ibsen became known to us which 
 encouraged me to believe that they had 
 found in his gloomy exhibition of incom- 
 patibilities and wayward affinities an unex- 
 pected gospel ? They found it in their 
 enjoyment by contrast of a conscious and 
 elaborated companionship and co-operation 
 which they had not observed among many 
 of their friends, and which, except in the 
 love - instincts of courtship too often 
 illusory they had not really anticipated. 
 
 Nor may we leave out of sight that for 
 good or for evil I believe, with all draw- 
 backs, for good Ibsen has set a fashion 
 which has made our own stage illustrate 
 for the first time with any seriousness, the 
 doctrine of pre-nuptial morality on the part 
 of men ; a doctrine which, in one way and 
 another, has been discredited, or at least 
 held in abeyance by society; a doctrine 
 which is even now by many regarded as a 
 pious opinion or a counsel of perfection ; a
 
 54 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 doctrine for which we are now at the 
 fulness of time ; a doctrine which is neces- 
 sary to rectify the balance of our morality 
 and the balance of justice between the 
 sexes. Anything that can purify the young 
 male life will work a most salutary 
 revolution in society. 
 
 I hope I do not seem to be pressing this 
 matter unduly. I am painfully sensible of 
 the difficulty of pressing it at all. Good 
 people cannot believe what evil exists. 
 Worldly people will not believe that the 
 evil can in any appreciable degree be got 
 rid of. But it is worthy of consideration 
 how wonderfully the manners and opinions 
 of society have improved since the last 
 century ; and within the next half-century 
 there will, I believe, be a greatly accele- 
 rated improvement. It looks as little likely 
 now as the improvement we have realized 
 looked in the days of Lord Byron. But it 
 will come ; and it will be much facilitated
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 55 
 
 by the effect of that culture of women 
 which is here so greatly promoted. 
 
 I can only hint at the immensely im- 
 portant fact that this subject has and 
 must have bearings on health and heredity 
 which Ibsen has not shrunk from exploiting. 
 He has been charged with obscenity. 
 There is one puzzling instance which it is 
 difficult to explain away. But I do not 
 class as obscene the deliberate and brave 
 tackling with high moralistic purpose of 
 subjects which, though generally tabooed by 
 delicacy, may occasionally be dealt with 
 courageously by a great master of human 
 life upon his responsibility than which 
 none can be more serious than that which 
 had fallen upon Ibsen as a great teacher 
 of men by the time he wrote the solemn 
 play called Ghosts. 
 
 Returning for a moment to the plays in 
 which he has dealt with the more refined 
 aspects of affinity or non-affinity in married
 
 56 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 life, I must forego the attempt to trace 
 in this place the meaning of so subtle 
 a drama as A Lady from the Sea. Our 
 public have lately had an opportunity of 
 seeing Rosmersholm played with skill and 
 power. Deformed as it is by being brought 
 down to the scale of parochial pettinesses, 
 and rendered " queer " there is no other 
 word for it by the strange use as chorus 
 of one of Ibsen's odd literary wastrels it 
 is none the less a tragedy of extraordinary 
 and grasping power. Indeed, it is a double 
 tragedy. A wife supposed not to com- 
 prehend her husband has been driven to 
 self-inflicted death before the play begins 
 by a supposed comprehending female friend 
 of the husband, in whom rivalry and a 
 yearning affinity constitute a fanaticism, 
 and who has intrigued herself enthusi- 
 astically into the household. This awful 
 suicide before the rising of the curtain 
 is in apposition to the double suicide
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 57 
 
 of Kosmersholm and Rebecca West, which 
 at the fall of the curtain is seen from a 
 window and reported by the old servant 
 to the audience, and so ends the piece. 
 The shifting metaphysical business of the 
 action, all the power of which lies with 
 Miss West, falls between these two tragic 
 incidents. The lady is very convincing. 
 If she were vulgar, maladroit, unimpressive, 
 unlikely to win admiration and influence, 
 the necessary probability of the tragedy 
 would be lacking. As it is, the play has 
 to contend, in a cosmopolitan sphere, 
 with deficiencies characteristic of Ibsen's 
 peculiar provincial method. At one time 
 it is polished in its social intercourse and 
 by-play : affording Miss West opportu- 
 nities such as she might have in a play 
 by Sardou ; at another time it is mere 
 antic, or little else, or concerned episodi- 
 cally in dull local controversy. In the 
 antic passages in which Brendel figures,
 
 58 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 we have a curious instance of Ibsen's 
 dependence for chorus on eccentric men 
 of Bohemian and dissolute habits. In 
 these characters scarcely ever brought on 
 our stage he seems to discern a kind of 
 philosophical inspiration ; with the effect 
 upon British audiences that the worser 
 sort laugh and the better sort sustain a 
 moral shiver as at the puzzling presence 
 of something uncanny. In the Bacchic 
 incursions of Ulric Brendel, in the dog- 
 matic formalities of Hector Kroll, and in 
 Kosmersholm's weak conversation with a 
 low-minded local editor, the strongest 
 interest of the drama runs a risk of being 
 dissipated. But as Bebecca's motive and 
 character are developed, the Ibsen grip 
 grows firmer. During long passages the 
 play becomes as weird and awe-compelling 
 by its mere revelations of an unscrupulous 
 but afflated and intense personality as 
 any drama ever became by the use of
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 59 
 
 supernatural or melodramatic effects. Such 
 is the strange, absorbing action that lies 
 between the single suicide of the destroyed 
 wife and the double suicide of the victims 
 of a crude and unaccomplished affinity. 
 I have never found any tragedy more really 
 tragic. As in Macbeth, but more so, we 
 are led to remark sardonically what poor 
 creatures men are that women make such a 
 fuss about; but Kebecca is quite a nine- 
 teenth-century boudoir Lady Macbeth. 
 She is sometimes called an adventuress. 
 The epithet cannot with any nicety be 
 applied to her. She is a dreadful woman 
 of another sort. Unscrupulous as she is, 
 she is sincerely concerned for Eosmers- 
 holm as for herself. She desires with a 
 devouring hunger that they should both 
 live their lives and live them together, and 
 that their lives should be one and indivisible, 
 and largely operative. She is quite in- 
 different who suffers in order that this may
 
 60 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 be ; but it is only under this strong impulse 
 that she behaves as an adventuress would 
 behave for sheer self-interest. All the 
 same, it is doubtless true that if she had 
 not found this excitement she would have 
 craved another. 
 
 The superiority which is secured to Ros- 
 mersliolm by its gloomy tragic force is 
 secured to A DolVs House by wild and 
 subtle and invincible domestic pathos. 
 Who that has seen or even read this play 
 can ever forget the winsome young wife, 
 loving her husband and loved by him, but 
 miserable perpetually under the knowledge 
 that she and her ways and her life are 
 mere innocent toys to him ? In any case 
 a woman of her noble temperament must 
 have suffered from this, but Nora Helmer 
 has in her heart the memory of a great 
 criminal sacrifice that she has made for the 
 husband who considers her a mere pretty 
 twittering lark, occasionally condescending
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 61 
 
 in the majesty of his masculine nature to 
 allow his senses to be dazzled by her beauty 
 and her brightness. She waits for her 
 miracle the miracle of intelligent gratitude 
 from a nature too hide-bound in its own 
 conceptions to apprehend, still more to 
 appreciate, the heroism she has achieved. 
 Her miracle never, never comes. This 
 play has scarcely any of the crudeness 
 characteristic of the author. It is Ibsen 
 with few of Ibsen's weaknesses. With 
 homely natural art the poor woman is 
 shown swallowing her tears, keeping down 
 her misery, playing with her children, 
 keeping at arm's length the husband's friend 
 who would make love to her. More and 
 more impossible her life becomes to her. 
 At last she is compelled by circumstances 
 to confess to her husband that years ago 
 she committed forgery to save his life. 
 This is the critical moment; and the 
 miracle comes not. The husband densely
 
 62 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 fails to appreciate her tremendous sacrifice. 
 He is at first loftily severe, and afterwards 
 smugly forgiving. " There is something," 
 says he, in this latter vein " something 
 indescribably sweet and soothing to a man 
 in having forgiven his wife honestly, from 
 the bottom of his heart." In that moment 
 it bursts upon her that she "has been 
 living in that home these eight years with 
 a strange man, and has borne him three 
 children." When her husband sees nothing 
 but imprudence and dishonour in the great 
 deed of glorious shame which she has com- 
 mitted for his sake, and graciously forgives 
 her for it, talking seriously to her for the 
 first time in their lives, the rest is heart- 
 break but not submission. She will be 
 the little squirrel, the toy-wife, no longer. 
 The wild, whirling dance has prefigured her 
 revolt, though Helmer only saw in it a 
 merry hysteria that tickled his senses the 
 spurning of his endearments shudderingly
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 63 
 
 anticipated the end the sudden leaving 
 home the heavily banged street door the 
 silence of the after-separation. Here the 
 thesis of Ibsen's affinity-plays is supported 
 by a touching story, and the heroine lives 
 for ever in our affections. 
 
 I have said nothing of Ibsen's political 
 plays. All have good general principles, 
 especially of public spirit and of individual 
 upright conduct in public life. All possess 
 grit and grip. All succeed, in spite of 
 intense and belittling provinciality. The 
 historical plays are able and have fine 
 passages and striking characters and collo- 
 cation of characters. In Emperor and 
 Galilean there is a strong and very un- 
 favourable embodiment of Julian. The 
 finest female character in all Ibsen I take to 
 be Lona Hessel in The Pillars of Society, 
 in which play there is enough sound 
 doctrine" and example of life and manners 
 to make us all good men and women, if we
 
 64 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 will condescend to be preached to from a 
 provincial text. 
 
 And, after all, why not ? We, at least, 
 have some reason to respect provinciality. 
 Are we not proud of the manageable, 
 comprehensible, capable-of-being-stimulated 
 life with which we are all familiar? Do 
 we not value the individuality, the power, 
 the self-respect, the past growth and the 
 makable history of the great cities in 
 which some of us have been born and to 
 which many of us have been drawn?* 
 
 * University College, Liverpool, was founded fifteen 
 years ago by public subscription and large individual 
 benefactions. The total sum so applied in money, land 
 and buildings was about 404,000 of which the 
 municipal corporation voted 30,000 in land. Almost 
 all the money was given within a couple of years. 
 And about the same time the people of Liverpool 
 subscribed 96,000 for the establishment of the diocese, 
 and 155,000 for the rebuilding of the Eoyal Infirmary, 
 of which 15,000 was granted by the corporation. I 
 mention these remarkable amounts, not for their own 
 sake, but because they illustrate the public spirit of 
 a provincial community and imply a great and in- 
 creasing general interest in the best things.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 65 
 
 Do we not say to ourselves, and rightly, 
 that the opportunities for strong individual 
 public responsibility, whether in public or 
 private life, are greater here than in a 
 capital ? Are we not conscious that to 
 help culture and morals and the doing of 
 
 f 
 
 good here is more practicable? Are we 
 not aware that if we are doing no good in 
 art, in letters, in science, in philanthropy 
 and in religion here we are neglecting that 
 which lies next, nay, under our hands ? 
 
 This is what Ibsen has never neglected. 
 Whatever his faults, his shortcomings, he 
 has always striven to give men and women 
 better ideals, and he has for the most part 
 shown them these within their daily lives, 
 and not beyond them. We may wonder, as 
 we read his plays, what Norway is. There 
 are some who say that he lived away at 
 Munich, and forgot what manner of place 
 his native country was, and misrepresented 
 his fellow-countrymen. To us there is the
 
 66 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 note of human nature, of provincial human 
 nature, of human nature somewhat sub- 
 limated by modern culture, but still naive 
 in revelation of itself in all that he has 
 written. And plays that can so be described 
 are plays for us to study.
 
 POSTSCEIPT. 
 
 THE play Little Eyolf has been produced 
 since this lecture was delivered, and, having 
 lately been played in London, has given 
 rise to considerable discussion. It is un- 
 doubtedly a great, while a morbid, work. 
 Its morbidness is no argument against its 
 greatness. Little Eyolf does not suggest to 
 me any general criticisms that are not 
 covered by the lecture. 
 
 The champagne scene is a transcript of 
 life, skilfully and delicately rendered so 
 delicately as to incur a necessary im- 
 probability. Such things do happen where 
 men and women are of contrasted sexual 
 temperament or pass into contrasted sexual 
 moods. But if silence is broken, it is with
 
 68 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 more passionate and literal speech. Eita's 
 expressions on the central idea of the dis- 
 cussion are more oblique and literary than 
 those of a wife of her temperament at such 
 a juncture would be. This is obviously for 
 reasons of decorum in a scene that was to 
 be publicly represented. So that if you 
 grant that Ibsen was entitled to broach the 
 subject, gratuitous indelicacy in his manner 
 of doing so is the last thing with which he 
 can be truly charged. And any one who 
 supposes that Ibsen adventures upon such 
 episodes for the sake of nastiness does not, 
 I am persuaded, in the least degree under- 
 stand the man, though I suspect Ibsen may 
 be capable of a certain elation in bold 
 recognition of sexual considerations where 
 important dramatic events turn on them. 
 " Necessary questions of the play " do turn 
 on them at least as indicatory criteria 
 oftener than has been supposable from the 
 avoidance of this phase in the general run
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 69 
 
 of serious conjugal drama. The grave 
 question whether such things ought to be 
 recognized in public plays, offers to a 
 dramatist of true insight the dilemma of 
 leaving his theme insufficiently elucidated 
 or shocking the public. Ibsen steps over 
 the difficulty by genius, and what un- 
 questionable genius produces true criticism 
 may canvass, but will not reject. Ibsen's 
 conception of Eita has contributed to the 
 drama a thoroughly revealing portraiture 
 of a healthy, womanly, wifely, motherly 
 woman driven into unhealth (as a mother) 
 and towards unhealth (as a wife) by the 
 declension into mechanical sexual in- 
 difference of the man whom she loves 
 body and soul, and to whom without a 
 moment's default or intermission or enter- 
 tainment of the idea of change, she, body 
 and soul, has remained, so to speak, 
 ravenously faithful. This, her full and 
 phenomenal faithfulness, makes her case
 
 70 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 vividly tragical. If the subject is an im- 
 proper one, Ibsen's genius has forced the 
 world to contemplate what ought to be 
 ignored, But as to the manner, it could 
 not have been more devoid of offence. 
 
 The more artful art of Mr. Pinero almost 
 always baulks us of the complete and logical 
 pursuance of a problem by some cross-scent 
 of chance incident as, for instance, the 
 conventual education of Mr. Tanqueray's 
 daughter by his first wife. Even in the 
 Ibsen plays, problems are qualified by per- 
 turbations such as the discovery in Little 
 Eyolf that Asta is not really entitled as 
 a sister to u the only love that is not sub- 
 ject to the law of change." This thread 
 of peculiar hue is worked into the pattern 
 with great skill and much strengthens the 
 interest, while, and at the same time, partly 
 evading the problem. The sister who proves 
 no sister saves herself and her gwasi-brother- 
 lover by flight with a persevering and only
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 71 
 
 hall-loved wooer, braving the risk pointed 
 out to her of " finding the right fellow- 
 traveller when it is too late." The dd- 
 nouement which comes to Allmers and 
 Kita, or to which they deliberately ad- 
 vance, is so transcendentally alien from 
 Ibsen's usual pessimism that it provokes a 
 doubt whether the dramatist believes in it, 
 or is offering a saturnine, solemn hoax to a 
 public which desires " happy endings." It 
 is approached and accomplished, however 
 (juvenile as may seem its quality, if single- 
 inindedly devised), with perfectly achieved 
 and impressing sincerity. There is no false 
 note in the intense purpose of the two 
 troubled beings as they resolve, having 
 missed their own way to happiness, to 
 spend their remaining time in improving 
 the lot of the poor and vicious. Played 
 with due inspiration, the scene must pro- 
 duce in any audience deep interest, though 
 that interest will be unattended with any
 
 72 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 conviction that husband and wife will live 
 happy ever afterwards. We may plead in 
 bar of criticism on the score of unlikelihood 
 that a couple who have developed so meta- 
 physical a cloud- structure out of a matri- 
 monial incompatibility often treated as a 
 matter of course, are likely enough on the 
 rebound to take up with any humanitarian 
 fanaticism. 
 
 Of the crutch and the evil eye and the 
 rat-wife it is only necessary to say that 
 they are good examples of the mystical 
 expedients by which Ibsen surrounds his 
 problems with glamour. The question of 
 the utility of the play is not material to 
 criticism, but I hold it important, and do 
 not shirk it. Novels and plays are the 
 reverse of useful if applied with indis- 
 criminate comparison to our actual lives ; 
 but such a play as Little Eyolf upholds a 
 true ideal of connubial union that exem- 
 plified by Eita : a whole heart and a
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 73 
 
 responsive temperament. Everything that 
 is unpleasant, deplorable and puzzling in the 
 play, comes of defection from that ideal. 
 This is enough to guide sensible people to 
 the stimulus and the correction which the 
 play should yield them. 
 
 To some minds the saddest thing in this 
 fine play is one that to the ordinary man and 
 woman is the gladdest namely, the con- 
 venient exit of Asta from the Allmers 
 household by her marriage with the per- 
 sistent wooer to whom she has confessed 
 that she can only give half of herself. This 
 is the link that most practically connects 
 the story with the most ever-recurring 
 factor of the conjugal department of human 
 life namely, the readiness of women on 
 various pretexts to have recourse to ill- 
 assorted union. What hope is there of 
 improvement in this region of the human 
 lot when a woman of bright intelligence 
 and full acquaintance with the problem,
 
 74 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 and deeply in love with a man she cannot 
 marry, solves or rather renews the diffi- 
 culty by going off and marrying a man she 
 does not love; and when we all feel that 
 this is just what would be likely to happen 
 in real life arnid general applause ?
 
 PART II. 
 
 BY 
 
 PERCY CROSS STANDING.
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 THE FIGHTER LOOKING BACK. 
 
 " THE State must go ! " declared Ibsen to 
 a friend some years ago a sufficiently 
 Revolutionary declaration. Revolutionist 
 or not, the effect which Ibsen's writings 
 have produced upon modern thought will 
 hardly be realized until their misinterpreted, 
 misunderstood author shall have passed 
 into the silence. Ibsen had almost attained 
 the winter of life ere his most popular 
 efforts were given to the world. Goethe 
 finished Faust at the age of sixty-six. Ibsen 
 did not complete his Master-Builder until 
 sixty winters had whitened his head. And 
 probably most who knew his work will 
 agree that the Norwegian master did not
 
 78 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 attain the height of his power as play- writer 
 until the publication of The Master- Builder. 
 For if Ghosts and A Doll's House laid the 
 foundations of a fame that can never grow 
 stale, and if Hedda Gdbler cemented the 
 beginnings of a real castle, it was reserved 
 for The Master-Builder to gild its author 
 with the title of " master " himself. 
 
 In a study of the works of this writer, 
 you are the most struck by the remarkable 
 simplicity of his diction, more effective 
 than any excursion into far-distant realms 
 of hyperbole. You can never understand 
 your Ibsen so much is certain, whatever 
 the theme and the theme is generally the 
 all-absorbing one of women and men. Some 
 critics have found Nora Helmer, in A 
 Doll's House, the finest among his feminine 
 creations so far as regards the social 
 dramas for which the world mainly knows 
 him. And without doubt Nora possesses 
 a beautiful mind; but to my thinking,
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 79 
 
 graceful, imperious, wayward Hilda Wangel 
 is her superior as a piece of creative work. 
 Ibsen loves to typify ; and each of these 
 women may be reckoned, in her different 
 way, a type of her sex's "unrest." Watch 
 Nora as she fights out the great conflict 
 with herself, to make the terrible discovery 
 that she has "been living with a strange 
 man for eight years, and has borne him 
 three children." Or observe Hilda, as, 
 without the least thought of wrong-doing, 
 she blithely enters into the life of the man 
 who, ten years before, has promised to 
 make her "his little princess." 
 
 In drawing the two principal characters 
 in his Master-Builder, Ibsen, always trying, 
 and trying vainly, to overtake and embrace 
 his own ideals, seems to me to symbolize 
 the unattainable. As he would be the first 
 to admit, he has not wholly succeeded for 
 those ideals do not exist, unfortunately. 
 It is himself, say some Continental critics,
 
 8o Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 that he represents in the character of 
 Solness, "the old fighter looking back 
 (regardant derridre lui) surveying the long 
 working day, and counting the cost." But 
 in reality, the only character in which Ibsen 
 avowedly symbolizes himself is that of the 
 courageous Dr. Stockmann, in An Enemy 
 of the People the least imaginative of the 
 plays, but, for that self-same reason, not 
 the least interesting. The time has long 
 ago passed for receiving with incredulity 
 and disdain a work from this pen. Ibsen's 
 admirers will hardly have forgotten the 
 outcry of "improper" and worse that 
 greeted the publication of Hedda Gabler in 
 1889. As a psychological study of a 
 certain type of femininity, the character 
 of Hedda presents the most remarkable 
 (though not the most attractive !) of Ibsen's 
 feminine creations. There is ever the same 
 brilliant subtlety of suggestion, the same 
 simplicity of diction, as witness this extract
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 81 
 
 from the wonderful dialogue with Lov- 
 borg 
 
 "Hedda: Cannot you understand that a young 
 girl, if it can be done in in secret ? 
 
 "Lovborg: Well? 
 
 "Hedda: Would like very much to have a peep 
 into a world which 
 
 " Lovborg : Which? 
 
 "Hedda: Which she is not allowed to know 
 anything about ? 
 
 "Lovborg: Comradeship in the desire of life. 
 But then, why could it not have gone on ? 
 
 " Hedda : That was your own fault. 
 
 " Lovborg : It was you who broke it off. 
 
 " Hedda : Yes, there was the imminent danger 
 that our relationship might have become a reality. 
 You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Ejbert 
 Lovborg. How could you wish to take advantage 
 of me, your trusting comrade ? " 
 
 One noted French critic has charac- 
 terized the works of Ibsen, and, I think, 
 justly, as the Drama of Ideas; but he 
 hastens to indicate that by " ideas" he 
 does not mean " theses." And he submits 
 that the only question which preoccupies 
 
 G
 
 82 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 the dramatist throughout his productions 
 is the question of how to reconcile the 
 life of society with the inner life of to- 
 day ? Certain it is that the hostile remarks 
 that many among our best-known by 
 which I do not mean our best critics 
 still indulge in at Ibsen's expense, are 
 marked by anything save a profound 
 knowledge of his abstract intentions. In 
 fact, it remains a standing reproach to 
 that which passes for English criticism, 
 that Continental writers have in the main 
 not only formed a better appreciation of 
 Ibsen's inner meanings, but are usually 
 able to interpret them after a more 
 reasonable fashion. 
 
 For example, the opinion of Vald-Vedel, 
 the Danish literary critic, that Building- 
 master Solness stands for the author 
 looking back upon himself and his life's 
 work, is a singularly beautiful, if erroneous, 
 construction. Why should not the master
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 83 
 
 symbolize himself and all that he has 
 attempted, in the character of a master- 
 builder ? At all events, Vedel religiously 
 abstains from imitating those Norse, 
 Swedish, Finnish, and other penmen, who 
 complain of what they now style Ibsen's 
 "lack of new ideas." He even suggests that 
 The Master- Builder spelt a fresh development 
 of the Drama of Ideas. " It was after all 
 these ideas had come into organic unison 
 in Ibsen's brain, that he constructed la 
 trdme which gave them dramatic form." 
 
 Nevertheless, many have been exceed- 
 ingly severe upon the character of Sol- 
 ness. Vedel thought that his grandeur 
 " was of a brutal order, and his language 
 at times vulgar." Vedel was wrong wrong 
 as the doctors were in thinking Solness 
 mad. His language is never vulgar. Again, 
 Frederick Jungersen was almost brutally 
 unjust in affirming that " after all, he 
 (Solness) finished by building, not only
 
 84 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 'houses for men only,' but palaces for 
 lust." Doubtless this critic was making 
 allusion to the " castles in the air," " the 
 most beautiful things in the world," as 
 Hilda calls them. Ibsen never came 
 nearer, closer to warm reality it sounds 
 paradoxical, perhaps than when he con- 
 structed these castles in the air. For 
 they daily encroach upon our lives, 
 these castles, do they not ? If we but 
 knew it, we all are living in a world of 
 illusions, unrealities, impossibilities and 
 this most of all when we are fancying 
 ourselves strong and practical. These 
 " castles" are so easy to build that we 
 go on constructing them all day and 
 every day; but delicious as it is to live 
 in them, how hopeless to have to admit 
 that we cannot live on them ! And this is 
 what Ibsen realizes for us again and again. 
 
 In some sense, and particularly in his 
 Socialism, Ibsen is a kind of decadent
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 85 
 
 William Morris the poet of " the long, 
 long day of the darkness." In the deeper 
 sense, how much more nearly does he 
 resemble Whitman ! 
 
 Tjugonde Haftat, of Upsala, has affirmed 
 that the characters of Hedda G-abler and 
 of Solness the Master-Builder form a 
 natural sequence, the one to the other. 
 Hedda, he says, "proves the error of 
 Ibsen's earlier theories, until at last we 
 see a man who falls from the top of the 
 tower of vanity, cruelty, and lust which 
 he has constructed for himself." But is 
 it so? We know that if Hedda is a 
 woman so terribly and constantly swayed 
 by gnawing discontent, that at times her 
 spirit holds depths blacker than Erebus 
 itself, so is Hilda a girl-woman wholly anti- 
 thetical imperious, impulsive, passionate, 
 joyous, "herself," until the moment when 
 the " troll " that possesses her forces her 
 into the presence of Solness. Never is
 
 86 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 this vital character more witchingly 
 vivacious than when she cries, with such 
 heartfelt meaning, " Yes ! father's alive ! " 
 in reply to Solness's query. But to de- 
 clare that Hilda lives because Hedda died 
 the death, is surely folly of the most pro- 
 found. No, it is simply that Ibsen, during 
 long years, has been perfecting and polish- 
 ing his extraordinary knowledge of the 
 feminine mind. Has not some epigram- 
 matist said that only two men, Henrik 
 Ibsen and George Meredith, really under- 
 stand women ? 
 
 By the time he wrote The Master- Builder, 
 Ibsen had indeed incurred a heavy respon- 
 sibility as prophet. We find this expressed, 
 often vaguely but always beautifully, in his 
 frequent references to the influence of "the 
 younger generation." The young with 
 the old Hilda with Solness he makes 
 " climb right to the top," but not, alas! 
 hand in hand. Banging back to Hedda
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 87 
 
 Gabler, we find it said of her by one of the 
 Philistines that " in the life of Hedda, 
 nothing suited her half so well as the 
 quitting of it." Another thinks that the 
 death of Hedda is arbitrary, just as 
 arbitrary as the catastrophe of Solness. 
 To this opinion I cannot subscribe. But, 
 admitting the theory of Judge Brack, that 
 " people don't do such things " as the pistol- 
 shot in Hedda Gabler, I submit that the 
 tragedy of the tower in The Master- Builder 
 strikes the reader with a sense of pro- 
 foundest sadness. For, admitting again the 
 sometimes uninviting and invidious ex- 
 terior of Solness, he had lived the saddest, 
 most broken of lives he, who " could not 
 live," as he cries in his agony, " without joy 
 in life." Ibsen pre-eminently possesses the 
 trick of depicting characters as delicately 
 chiselled as they are human. In almost 
 every instance his creations exemplify 
 Truth to Life.
 
 88 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 No matter which of these dramas you 
 select, nearly all of the personages introduced 
 stand, so to speak, for the very realism of the 
 ideal. Thus, Solness thinks at first that 
 he will only huild churches for God : he 
 builds, he is disappointed, for behold ! the 
 people will not have these churches. 
 (" Fancy their not wanting them ! " says 
 Hilda, sotto voce.) Then, to console him- 
 self, he determines he will build " homes for 
 human beings." Here, again, he is doomed 
 to failure. He finds that " men have no need 
 of these houses of theirs to live in," and 
 " building houses is not worth sixpence." 
 Eeader, men have no need of these homes 
 of theirs to be happy in where " father 
 and mother and the troop of children may 
 live together in comfort and happiness, 
 secure in the lovely thought that they 
 belong to each other." As v Solness found 
 by experience, and after it was too late, 
 " the whole is nothing." Or take the
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 89 
 
 character of Aline Solness. Halvard and 
 Aline are a typical, everyday instance 
 of silent tragedy in domestic life the 
 courage and energy and vitality of the man 
 kept down and stifled by the hopeless, un- 
 responsive nature of the woman. Here we 
 have a man, yet in his vigour and prime, 
 starving for lack of a love that would make 
 and shape his life even the life of 
 Solness, the great, the famous Master- 
 Builder. It is at this juncture that Hilda 
 Wangel comes tripping upon the scene. 
 She is the New Spirit, she comes " under 
 a new banner," to apprise her Master- 
 Builder that "the ten years" are expired. 
 She represents the younger generation that 
 he loves and fears, and the stretching out 
 of his hands to her is involuntary and 
 uncontrollable. The words of a minor poet 
 come to mind as we linger over the sad 
 fates of Solness and his wife, his mind 
 becoming atrophied for lack of that which
 
 go Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 could make and mould it, her time passed 
 in vain imaginings, idle regrets, dead 
 longings 
 
 " We marvel that the silence can divide 
 
 The living from the dead ; yet more apart 
 Are they who all life long dwell side by side, 
 But never heart by heart." 
 
 And yet, even to Mrs. Solness, it is 
 given to say several beautiful things, as 
 witness her comparison of her childhood's 
 dolls and her dead babies " I carried 
 them under my heart like little unborn 
 children." But now . . . there is Hilda 
 coming into the husband's broken life. I 
 must confess that I have failed to find 
 the slightest impurity in their relations. 
 It has been foolishly, ignorantly said that 
 Ibsen preaches " free love " wholesale and 
 indiscriminate. How ? when ? where ? 
 Solness is surely intended to typify the 
 Spirit of the Age, unbending in his 
 resolves to be first at all hazards, not
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 91 
 
 to be trampled underfoot by that terrible 
 younger generation, striving hard to put 
 aside sentimentality for ever and brand 
 himself Man of the World alone. Hilda 
 steps in to disarrange his plans. 
 
 Given another wife a woman, not a 
 human mummy Solness must have been 
 a different man. " The girl from Lysanger " 
 was to him as Josephine to Napoleon, with 
 the difference that Josephine lacked 
 Hilda's will-power. " I can die for you, 
 Sire, but I cannot quit you," exclaimed the 
 deposed consort : not so Hilda. Talley- 
 rand would never have got through with his 
 Act of Separation if he had had to deal 
 with a Hilda Wangel. Until she appeared, 
 Solness's will had been paramount ; it was 
 forced to bow down and accommodate itself 
 to hers. " There is not a corner in me safe 
 from you," he says to her. In the scene 
 or rather, at that point in the duologue 
 where he broaches the subject of " the
 
 92 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Viking spirit," one obtains a rare insight 
 into the young girl's character. She tells 
 him she would like him to possess, even as 
 the old Vikings did, " a radiantly healthy 
 conscience;" she would have him dare do 
 what he would. On another page she tells 
 him (making you think that the young 
 ladies of Lysanger must be satirical and 
 unsympathetic critics) that he is " a builder 
 with a dizzy conscience." Frank and un- 
 ashamed Hilda certainly is ; but one can- 
 not resist catching an inspiration of the 
 Master-Builder's infatuation for her when, 
 towards the last, she dares him to mount 
 the dizzy scaffolding. Not only scaffolding 
 is it for Solness. It is the scaffold. . 
 
 Ibsen might advantageously have entitled 
 this play An Idyll of Castle-Building. It 
 is not yet understanded of the people true. 
 Spite of the remarks of the captious and 
 the Philistine, though, Hilda is far, far 
 more than " a splendid animal." Hand in
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 93 
 
 hand with her, his creation, he has mounted; 
 yet something seems wildly to suggest that 
 Ibsen has hardly been " able to do it after 
 aU . . ." 
 
 An ingenious Norwegian once suggested 
 that, in the character of Hilda, Ibsen 
 typifies the Spirit of Inebriety, and, in the 
 " ten years," an inveterate drunkard who 
 voluntarily debars himself from strong drink 
 for the space of a decade. Such symbol- 
 izing is " pleasing " or not, as one cares 
 to take it ; for it is only by the exegesis 
 of some such parable that one can always 
 depend upon being successful, as Sir 
 Edward Eussell expresses it, in " reading 
 one's secret into " these Ibsen books. And 
 here I am reminded that my distinguished 
 collaborator has assumed that we cannot 
 have the greatest of great plays from this 
 pen until it is successful in depicting beings 
 who " enlist our sympathies as well as 
 appeal to our intellects." In the present
 
 94 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 state of society, is this opinion acceptable ? 
 Would Ibsen be well advised to act upon 
 it ? Is it to be supposed that he ever will 
 act upon it ? No. For it is his inimitable 
 manner of treating the unlovely that 
 attracts, his vital method of grappling 
 with the sordid and the sinful, and of 
 shedding God's daylight upon it. Society 
 is a cancer. Was it not James Hinton 
 who uttered that immortal truth, pregnant 
 with so deep and dark a meaning, " ' Over- 
 turning society' is an inverted pyramid 
 getting straight " ? If Ibsen has not 
 proved wholly successful in cutting out 
 the cancer, he has revolutionized people's 
 minds ; and that, as he himself has said, 
 " is the one thing that avails." Herein 
 he proves to us that he is not merely the 
 author : he is the seer. 
 
 It is the penalty of most inceptors of 
 new movements that they shall be scorned 
 and persecuted. Prophets are in the
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 95 
 
 minority because, as Stockmann says, " the 
 compact majority is never right." Victor 
 Hugo's view of the French Revolution 
 is that " these things would never have 
 happened if they had hanged Voltaire and 
 sent Eousseau to the galleys." Perhaps 
 Hugo is right. At all events, failing the 
 hanging or shooting of those philosophers, 
 the Revolution did come about. The 
 noblesse laughed aloud at the publication 
 of Rousseau's Contrat Social; but they 
 laughed too soon, and it is an indisputable 
 fact that their own skins went to bind 
 its second edition. With Rousseau so with 
 Ibsen he is the enemy of society. 
 
 Do life-stories ever end, except with 
 parting or except with death? Ibsen 
 thinks not. That is the reason why the 
 bulk of his work leaves us with a great 
 sense of unrest, of incompleteness, "just 
 like the ruins left by a fire." On each 
 last page of almost every play we find a
 
 96 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 note of interrogation, an unanswered query. 
 Probably the aptest illustration of this in- 
 consequent " incompleteness " is to be 
 found in the concluding sentence of Hedda 
 Gabler, uttered by Judge Brack, and so 
 profoundly surcharged with bitterest irony 
 at the expense of the society of our day 
 who " don't do such things." 
 
 So that the author of Ghosts, whose 
 views of life would deserve to be stigma- 
 tized as pitifully pessimistic if they were 
 not so pitiably, terribly true, sums up to 
 the cold, sad conclusion that the whole 
 of life, as one lives it, is "nothing." 
 Meanwhile, he hopes for a happier con- 
 summation of his unfulfilled ideals in the 
 direction where Hilda Wangel hears " harps 
 in the air."
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 ALL OB NOTHING. 
 
 Peer Gynt and Brand are th'e two great 
 poem-plays- so curiously and wonderfully 
 contrasted by which Ibsen has attained 
 a fame totally different to that won for 
 him by the group of social problem plays. 
 Peer Gynt himself is the personification 
 of the idea of Self. " To be one's self 
 is to lose one's self " he declares ; and upon 
 this harsh, relentless doctrine of the fight 
 for self-absorbing self, the whole theory 
 of Peer Gynt is worked out. Just as 
 Building-Master Solness stands for abject 
 fear of that terrible " younger genera- 
 tion " the building upon others to avoid
 
 98 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 being down-trodden in the fray so does 
 the complex, vicious character of Peer 
 stand for belief in a man being " enough 
 for himself." Actable this work is not and 
 never can be. Bather is it intended for 
 the study than the stage more as an 
 undying sermon than an attempt to draw 
 a theatre audience out of itself. Ibsen 
 is fond of one dominant figure to work 
 out the destinies of the plots that he lays 
 down. The figures that are grouped 
 around Peer Gynt are mostly puppets, or 
 little else as Peer's mother, the pastor, 
 the peasant-soldier, the extraordinary half- 
 mystical figure of the woman with whom 
 this intellectual bagman has such extra- 
 ordinary relations. In the same sense 
 that Peer dwarfs the other characters, 
 Solness is all-dominant in Tlie Master- 
 Builder, Mrs. George Tesman in Hedda 
 Gabler, Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of 
 the People , and so on.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 99 
 
 But Brand is the typical instance of 
 Ibsen's employment of the one central 
 figure to unfold his narrative, to point his 
 moral. Professor Herford has well said 
 that in this, in many essentials the crown- 
 ing work of his genius, the poet-dramatist 
 fuses the intellectual athleticism of a 
 Browning with the prophetic fire of a 
 Carlyle. If Peer Gynt he representative 
 of Self, then all the more is Brand the 
 veritable figure of Will. The Norse priest 
 who fights religion in religion's own name 
 is undoubtedly the most brilliantly ideal- 
 istic portrait in the whole Ibsen gallery. 
 Cromwell would have made a general of 
 the man who is so torn to the inmost 
 core by this terrible " thunder of the wind 
 of Will," that he forces his wife, his dearly 
 loved Agnes, to part with every shred of 
 the clothing of her dead child to the first 
 'mother that approaches needing the where- 
 withal to clothe a living child. (But
 
 ioo Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 would Brand, in his splendid austerity and 
 unevangelical ideals, have tolerated a 
 Cromwell's peculiar doctrines of earthly 
 ambition?) The religious irreligion of 
 Brand the teacher and priest at times 
 makes us shudder even while we rever- 
 ence. The climax of the story comes when 
 the first mother that approaches turns out 
 to be of light character. But Brand's 
 insistence upon the dread doctrine of All 
 or Nothing is inexorable indeed ! " He 
 gives to the devouring wave," he exclaims 
 to Agnes, a who in his giving gives not 
 all" and then it is that the horrid ragged 
 woman, with the starved child of shame 
 at her breast, addresses Brand thus 
 
 " Wot ye where it was, that birth ? 
 In a ditchside on the ground. 
 Gamblers drank and shouted round 
 Christen'd in the sleety slime, 
 Cross'd with charcoal-ashes' grime, 
 Suckled with a spirit-flask 
 When his mother bore him first,
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 101 
 
 There were some stood by and cursed. 
 
 Who could they be, do you ask ? 
 
 Bless you ! Why, the baby's father, 
 
 Or the baby's fathers rather ! 
 "Brand: Agnes? 
 " Agnes : Yes. 
 
 " Brand : Thy duty's clear. 
 "Agnes (shuddering): Never, never! Brand, to 
 her! 
 
 " The Woman : 
 
 " Give me, give me ! Give me all ! 
 
 Silk and broider'd jacket small ! 
 
 Nought's too good and nought's too bad, 
 
 If 'twill warm my starving lad. 
 
 He'll be going by-and-by, 
 
 Thaw his body ere he die ! 
 " Brand (to Agnes) : Choice is calling ! Hear'st 
 thou now ? " 
 
 This happens on Christmas Eve, and the 
 upshot of it is that the bereaved innocent 
 mother gives to the unbereft guilty mother 
 every scrap of clothing in which " was clad 
 at the font my little lad." I submit that 
 no eye can remain dry as it reads this 
 beautiful and pathetic melody of words.
 
 IO2 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Certainly no mother, whether of the living 
 or of the dead, can remain dry- eyed while 
 reading this or the passage immediately 
 subsequent, in which the heartbroken 
 Agnes confesses to her husband that she 
 has concealed the little cap of her dead 
 baby rather than give it to the woman. 
 Now it is that Brand takes the cap from 
 her, hastens after the woman, and hands 
 the last relic to her. What is Agnes's 
 rejoinder ? Does Ibsen spoil this magnifi- 
 cently reverent picture by making his ideal 
 wife and woman rail at her husband's 
 relentlessness ? No ! With that note of 
 calm resignation that Ibsen loves so well 
 reminding one of a lovely passage in In 
 Memoriam 
 
 " ('And in my heart, if calm at all, 
 If any calm, a calm despair.') " 
 
 she exclaims 
 
 " 0, how wond'rous is God's way ! 
 By that sacrifice so grievous
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 103 
 
 '"Won from bondage is my soul ; 
 He was given us but to lead us, 
 Died to lure me to the goal." 
 
 in short, she thanks her husband for his 
 determination to make her sacrifice Self to 
 Will, Nothing to All and who at this 
 juncture can remain unoppressed by tears ? 
 A few pages earlier we have heard Brand 
 and Agnes talking of their wee dead 
 boy. The pent-up sorrow in her, the flood- 
 gates of holiest maternity, must have their 
 way, and we seem almost to hear her 
 beautiful, broken tones as she sobs out 
 
 " Here must the candles stand. 
 Last year he stretch'd his tiny hand 
 After the glancing, dancing light : 
 He was so joyous and so bright, 
 He started from his little chair 
 And ask'd me if a sun it were." 
 
 Note the beautifully natural touch of 
 despairing, bereft motherhood that always 
 speaks of the lost one as " he." Note, too, 
 the wonderfully subtly-suggested gradations
 
 IO4 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 of Brand's determination, heart-broken 
 though he himself may be and is, to check 
 at all costs this eternal longing of Agnes 
 for the bringing-back of her dead. Once 
 more it is the triumph of Will and his 
 conquers over hers. Well may Sir Edward 
 Kussell write that Brand's speech to 
 Agnes over the cot of their sleeping 
 child (earlier in the poem) is the loveliest 
 thing ever said by a husband to a wife. 
 We admire and marvel at Brand, the pro- 
 phet and seer, because it is never found 
 possible to break either him or his resolution 
 down. As he remarks to his crafty enemy, 
 the Mayor (the latter a type of Norse 
 provincialism that Ibsen has an extra- 
 ordinary facility and skill in creating) 
 
 " ' The day will come when we shall know 
 That triumph's height is Overthrow.' " 
 
 or again when, as in the last act of the 
 five in which this dream-poem is contained,
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 105 
 
 we find him openly at war with the clergy 
 and laity alike, to whom he declares that 
 his eyes are unclosed at last, that until 
 now he has seen not that the call was for 
 Nothing or else All. But now, he says in 
 his frenzy of passion for " the God Who 
 hateth lies," he defines the Devil as " com- 
 promise," and he, even he, Brand, will end 
 it for ever and ever 
 
 " Men, at the crossway stand ye : choose ! 
 Wholly ye must will to lose 
 The old vesture of your lust, 
 Utterly anew be clad, 
 Ere our Temple from the dust 
 Eises, as it shall and must ! " 
 
 Yet even at this sublime moment Ibsen's 
 exquisite cynic humour makes itself felt 
 like a whip-lash, as he figures to us the 
 irresponsible Dean and the backsliding 
 Mayor writhing under the chastisement 
 of this godlike priest's unsparing tongue. 
 (The Dean: "The Mayor's chatter he
 
 io6 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 must mean." The Mayor: " That's the 
 twaddle of the Dean.") The end is now 
 in sight. We see Brand set upon and 
 stoned by the ignorant, the lewd, the hater. 
 And in the end he does not lie down to die. 
 Bather does he fall crushed under the 
 avalanche of Will. Like a deified Excelsior 
 he climbs, " bleeding and broken," up the 
 mountains of ice and snow, " towards the 
 peaks," as Ibsen has said elsewhere, " to- 
 wards the stars, and towards the great 
 silence." But in his hand he bears no 
 " banner with a strange device," no Tann- 
 haiiser staff destined to break forth into 
 blossom and bloom. He needs it not. 
 The great ghostly glacier shines ice-white, 
 but scarcely whiter than the soul of 
 Brand. He climbs on and ever upwards 
 unto God's own Sanctuary, and out of the 
 parted heavens a voice calls to us through 
 the crashing thunder that " He is the God 
 of Love."
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 107 
 
 Yes, Brand is typical of God Himself. 
 
 Ibsen was once heard to say, "I pride 
 myself on the objectivity of my Brand" 
 And to Professor Herford he has said, " I 
 wanted a verse in which I could career 
 where I would, as on horseback." How 
 nobly that expresses the noble metre in 
 which the poem is wrought ! If our own 
 language contains anything couched in a 
 similar versification that can compare with 
 it in simple beauty, in wealth of wording, 
 or in that indescribable quality of poesy 
 that leaves the eyelids wet even as one 
 reads, I must confess that it has not been 
 my good fortune to come across it. Who 
 shall say how Ibsen had searched and tried 
 his heart and mind ere Brand came into 
 being? I am afraid I cannot agree with 
 Mr. Herford's dictum that it even falls 
 short of Prometheus Unbound, in the elements 
 of "ethereal beauty and witching music." 
 How different, too, to anything else that
 
 io8 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 the same brain has ever given us ! The 
 sublimity of Agnes's self-surrender is but 
 the correlative of her higher love for 
 her husband that leaps into being as she 
 marvels and muses over the tearings of his 
 heart-strings, the grandeur of his self- 
 renunciation no less than her own. The 
 Church of Life is in very truth being built 
 up by them and yet, and yet 
 
 " What will it matter if the end 
 Was gain'd by telling truth or lying ? " 
 
 In those words we have the consumma- 
 tion of Brand's great gift the Irreligion 
 of Religion, the Belief of Unbelief. Never 
 was it his mission to pray, " Help Thou 
 my unbelief! " for does he not stand for 
 Belief in its highest aspects, its most noble 
 and beautiful forms and figures? Brand 
 is Will; and, being so, he is enough for 
 himself. "One soul he saved, and that 
 a mad one," is the Dean's vindictive
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 109 
 
 epitaph on Brand. And the Prophet's 
 immortal rejoinder is this 
 
 " One Man died for them of yore ; 
 Cowardice is crime no more ! " 
 
 But Brand is even more than All or 
 Nothing. It is the all of All, the nothing 
 of Nothing.
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 IBSEN AND THE CRITICAL. 
 
 THE influence of Ibsen's writings is observ- 
 able, whether for good or ill but I think 
 generally for good in most of the serious 
 work of English dramatic authorship during 
 the last few years, and more particularly 
 during the last three. 
 
 Few people who were resident in our 
 nation-city at that time will have forgotten 
 the burst of ridicule and unfair censure 
 evoked by the production of The Master- 
 Builder at the Trafalgar Theatre in 1893. 
 The reception of Wagner's first opera 
 smacked of the fairest of fair criticism by 
 comparison ! Yet these gentle critics ad- 
 mitted, when questioned, (1) that the play
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 1 1 1 
 
 was magnificently acted; and (2) that it 
 suited itself admirably to stage representa- 
 tion. Since, therefore, the critics did not 
 agree with the " common herd " who 
 allowed that, whereas the great Scandi- 
 navian's work might be brilliant, intro- 
 spective, and realistic, it was not written to 
 be acted in what did its failing consist ? 
 Was it not moral ? Were not its conclu- 
 sions perfectly natural and feasible ? 
 
 If thus pressed, the critical faculty could 
 furnish you with no adequate rejoinder. 
 Indeed, they forced you, unwillingly enough, 
 to two conclusions : (1) that their condem- 
 nation of work from this pen lay to a great 
 extent in the old distich, "I do not like 
 thee, Dr. Fell;" and (2) that their in- 
 tellects were scarcely of the calibre suited 
 to grapple with such moving problems as 
 those herein attacked ; this (2) being a 
 suggestion which I venture to make with 
 all due deference to dramatic critics so
 
 ii2 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 popular and well-meaning as Mr. Clement 
 Scott and Mr. Moy Thomas. 
 
 To all intents and purposes, only a 
 quartette of Ibsen's plays have enjoyed a 
 run of any length in England, viz. : A 
 Doll's House in 1889, Hedda GaUer in 1891, 
 The Master- Builder in 1893, and Little Eyolf 
 in 1896. The run of the first-mentioned 
 was only terminated by the fact that 
 certain members of the company were 
 under contract to appear elsewhere at a 
 given date ; the second-named was with- 
 drawn in the full tide of financial success ; 
 whilst the third attracted so much " busi- 
 ness " as the result of a few experimental 
 matinees, that it was put on at the Vaude- 
 ville Theatre, where it ran for several weeks. 
 At its initial morning performance, 80 was 
 taken by the management not a bad 
 result for the experimental matinee of a new 
 play by an author who, we are still assured, 
 "can never become popular."
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 113 
 
 Tentative and belated performances only 
 have distinguished the English attempts 
 to produce on the stage his less popular 
 social plays, such as The Wild Duck and 
 Rosmersholm. Still, it was refreshing to 
 hear Sir Henry Irving' s son declaring his 
 admiration for The Wild Duck, and avowing 
 his anxiety to sustain the character of 
 Ekdal. Other actors and actresses of re- 
 pute subscribe to this high opinion of the 
 dramatic merits of this drama, whose sim- 
 plicity of expression is only equalled by its 
 directness of purpose. On the other hand, 
 Mr. William Heinemann once told me that 
 among Ibsen's dramatic works he awarded 
 the palm to Emperor and Galilean not a 
 " social " drama at all, be it observed. It 
 is that mysterious quality of camaraderie 
 dans les desirs de la vie, that the champions 
 of " purity " have invariably found fault with 
 in Ibsen. Such a criticism finds its source 
 mainly in their inability to comprehend.
 
 H4 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 It is a remarkable personal fact that 
 Ibsen does not exactly share the views of 
 the Norwegian Left in their demands 
 for a larger share in the government of 
 " United " Scandinavia. Ibsen a " Boyalist 
 Democrat " ! is it not terrible even to con- 
 template ? Listen to what he said when 
 addressing a gathering of working-men 
 at Drontheim the Drontheim of King 
 Olaf. They were winged words, of un- 
 dying import : " Mere democracy cannot 
 solve the social question. An element of 
 aristocracy must be introduced into our 
 life. Of course, I do not mean the 
 aristocracy of birth or of the purse, or 
 even the aristocracy of intellect. I mean 
 the aristocracy of character, of will, of 
 mind. That only can free us. From two 
 groups will this aristocracy I hope for come 
 to our people from our women and our 
 workmen. The revolution in the social 
 condition, now preparing in Europe, is
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 115 
 
 chiefly concerned with the future of the 
 workers and the women. In this I place 
 all my hopes and my expectations. For 
 this I will work all my life and with all my 
 strength." 
 
 A Norwegian once remarked to me 
 that Ibsen is always asking questions 
 never answering them. " What would you 
 have?" I replied again; "for otherwise 
 Ibsen would not be Ibsen." And so it is. 
 There must always come the unfinished note 
 at the close ; his plays must end with the 
 note of interrogation, since a man cannot 
 write away from himself and his most 
 cherished convictions. 
 
 Another remarkable point to be noted is 
 the wonderful impetus given to interest in 
 Ibsen in a country like France by the pub- 
 lication of his latest works. Our Gallic 
 friends, who are so rarely guilty of taking 
 anything seriously, went absolutely wild 
 over Solness le Constmcteur and Eyolf.
 
 n6 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Their actors and actresses can act Ibsen 
 too with a difference. How amazingly 
 amusing it was, to be sure, when the artists 
 from the Comedie Francaise played Rosmers- 
 liolm here, to find one of our best-accepted 
 critics whose French, by the way, must 
 have been excessively shaky describing 
 the play as sounding " funny" in their 
 language, and especially declaiming against 
 the expression Us clievaux blancs de Rosmers- 
 holml Why? Presumably the meaning 
 was that the translator could not reproduce 
 the idiom. Granted ; but " the white horses 
 of Bosmersholm" is surely good enough for 
 a public who have Viking blood in their 
 veins. 
 
 How strangely strong is the actable 
 quality of Ibsen's work ! Critics may and 
 do bring what Mr. Archer picturesquely 
 calls " the 'arf-brick of abuse," but they 
 signally fail, one and all, to take away 
 from this wondrous quality. The author's
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 117 
 
 easy dialogue and complete mastery of stage 
 technique this last he ought to possess, as 
 Ole Bull's sometime stage-manager stamp 
 him at once as the beau ideal of a dramatic 
 author; while he is correspondingly free 
 from the reproach of using ordinary stage 
 contrivances or devices. The conscientious 
 and painstaking actor, intent on learning 
 his own art, need not be an Ibsenite 
 enthusiast to realize that every phrase and 
 sentence of the pungent dialogue is telling. 
 
 " I admire Ibsen," Mr. Louis Calvert 
 once said to me, "not for what he has 
 done, but for what he could do if he only 
 would." 
 
 " But then, if he wrote as you imply," I 
 answered, " he would no longer be Ibsen." 
 
 In another place I make allusion to a 
 more than harsh criticism of Ibsen occur- 
 ring in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's "Ke- 
 nascence " book a work which I venture 
 to think has been read by few with more
 
 n8 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 interest than by myself. The critic of a 
 leading London paper rebuked Mr. Jones 
 in the following very temperate and dig- 
 nified terms : " It is years since any one 
 with the slightest tincture of letters would 
 have dreamt of applying to Ibsen an epithet 
 which we decline to repeat. Mr. Jones 
 should really keep abreast of the times, 
 and not go babbling over the journalistic 
 inanities of 1890 or thereabouts." 
 
 A troublesome admirer once had the 
 temerity to ask Ibsen the " meaning" of a 
 certain play. . 
 
 " What I have written I have written," 
 replied the Master, fiercely. 
 
 In similar sense he has said elsewhere : 
 "The State crushes Individuality; away 
 with the State ! " And over the grave of 
 the historian Munch, in June, 1865, he 
 declared: "States like ours cannot hold 
 their own by material forces ; but nations 
 like ours can win the right to exist by
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 119 
 
 labouring for culture." Yes Ibsen believes 
 in Ibsen, whatever be the belief of the 
 critical faculty, or of that which too often 
 passes for the critical faculty. 
 
 " Hate a Frenchman as you hate the 
 devil ! " is attributed to Nelson. There be 
 some who have taken up a similar attitude 
 towards Ibsen the poet whose last solemn 
 word to us is : Life is pitiless.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE NEW IBSEN. 
 
 THE attitude of contemporary British dra- 
 matists towards Ibsen would be amusing 
 if it were not so lamentable. Mr. Henry 
 Arthur Jones has said that "a strong, 
 dirty man has written plays, and now 
 every feeble dirty man thinks himself a 
 dramatist." 1 Mr. Sydney Grundy has ex- 
 pressed to the present writer an opinion 
 not less severe. At the time of the 
 London production of Hedda Gabler, Mr. 
 Robert Buchanan wrote : " For sheer un- 
 adulterated stupidity, for inherent mean- 
 ness and vulgarity, for pretentious triviality 
 ... no Bostonian novel or London penny 
 novelette has surpassed Hedda Gabler" 
 1 " The Renascence of the English Drama," p. 340.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 121 
 
 Yet what are the facts ? In Mr. Henry 
 Arthur Jones's brilliant but dead-failing 
 play of Michael and his Lost Angel, the in- 
 fluence of Ibsen is more than plainly dis- 
 cernible. In Mr. Grundy's brilliant play, 
 The Greatest of These, the whole of one act 
 is practically nothing but Ibsen. In the 
 case of Mr. Buchanan, at least one of his 
 stage works may be said to have been 
 permeated by the same influence. As for 
 Mr. Pinero whose attitude towards the 
 Norwegian master is, however, considerably 
 more tolerant it is generally conceded 
 that his The Second Mrs. Tanqueray could 
 scarcely have been written but for a similar 
 overshadowing of the Norse spirit. And 
 who told Agnes Ebbsmith to throw the 
 Bible on the fire ? 
 
 Ibsen's Little Eyolf, in three acts, pub- 
 lished at the beginning of 1895, shows us 
 our author in a new and, in several essen- 
 tials, a less unquiet mood. Painful and
 
 122 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 soul-stirring in the extreme, dealing as it 
 does with the life and death of a little lame 
 child, it yet brings to us a sense of rest 
 at the last. For the first time we miss the 
 note of interrogation with which these 
 plays are wont to conclude. Resignation 
 is the key-note of the last act ; there is no 
 such insistence upon will as we find in 
 Brand ; no such eternal cryings-out of 
 self as we see in every page of Peer Gynt. 
 If the end is not happiness, it at all events 
 is peace. And yet the opening is stormy 
 and perturbed enough. There are but half 
 a dozen characters in Little Eyolf and of 
 these one is the child of Alfred and 
 Eita Allmers, another the supposed 
 half-sister of Allmers, and another the 
 mostly symbolical and entirely unpleasant 
 character of the Rat -wife. There is in 
 addition the slight character of Borgheim 
 in love with Asta. Of these six, Rita 
 Allmers stands out in bold relief as the
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 123 
 
 creature of strong and all-absorbing passion. 
 She was, as she herself confesses, fitted to 
 become the mother of little Eyolf but not 
 to be a mother to him. A fine distinction, 
 perhaps, to the ordinary mind ; but Ibsen 
 abounds in such, and if he unflinchingly 
 depicts Eita Allmers as one who disdains 
 to go " drowsing about with fishes' blood 
 in her veins," we feel that he is after all 
 but depicting an ordinary type of woman- 
 hood and wifehood. There is an intensely 
 powerful passage in which he paints an 
 alarmingly characteristic situation between 
 Eita and her less " vital " husband. 
 
 "Allmers (gently) : I will always go on caring for 
 you, with quiet tenderness. (He tries to lake her 
 hands.) 
 
 " Eita (avoiding him) : I don't care a bit for your 
 quiet tenderness ... I want you utterly and en- 
 tirely and alone ! Just as I had you in the first 
 rich beautiful days. . . (Looking up at him icith a 
 veiled glow in her eyes.} When I got your telegram 
 yesterday evening
 
 124 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 " Allmers : Yes ? What then ? 
 
 " Rita : Then I dressed myself in white 
 
 " Allmers : Yes, I noticed you were in white when 
 I arrived. 
 
 " Eita : I had let down my hair 
 
 " Attmers : Your sweet masses of hair 
 
 "Eita: So that it flowed down my neck and 
 shoulders 
 
 "Allmers: I saw it I saw it. Oh! how lovely 
 you were, Rita ! 
 
 " Eita : There were rose-tinted shades over both 
 the lamps. And we were alone, we two the only 
 waking beings in the whole house. And there 
 was champagne on the table. 
 
 " Allmers: I didn't drink any of it. 
 
 "Eita (looking bitterly at him): No, that's true. 
 (Laughs harshly.) 'There stood the champagne, 
 but you tasted it not ' as the poet says." 
 
 While Allmers' wife is in this un- 
 beatific and unblissful state of unhealthy 
 mind and unhealthy conscience, it can be 
 readily understood that she is bitterly 
 jealous even of their own child's love for 
 Alfred and the latter's for him. There 
 is another more than painful scene, in
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 125 
 
 which she expresses the awful wish that 
 Eyolf had never been horn, since he can 
 come, if only slightly, between her and her 
 devouring devotion to her husband. u lt 
 was in pain unspeakable," she says, " that 
 I brought him into the world. But I bore 
 it all with joy and rapture for your sake 
 . . . But there it must end. I will live 
 my life together with you wholly with 
 you." And, again, there is a terrible re- 
 criminatory passage between them, in 
 which the one parent condemns the other 
 for the lameness of Eyolf, saying that 
 the accident could not have happened if 
 they had not been so absorbed in their 
 own passion, to the exclusion of all else. 
 
 Nemesis visits the unhappy twain in 
 the swift sudden death of Eyolf by drown- 
 ing. The little lad has been having 
 a conversation with the fearsome Bat- 
 wife, who describes to the child how she 
 lures the rats, the " blessed little creatures,"
 
 126 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 to their destruction. This she figures to 
 the boy by explaining to him that " in the 
 old days ... I did the luring myself I 
 alone." To which wide-eyed Eyolf makes 
 breathless rejoinder, "And what did you 
 lure then?" " Men one most of all," 
 says the crone. "It was my own sweet- 
 heart, it was, little heart-breaker." But on 
 Eyolf begging to be told " where was 
 that one now?" she breaks in with the 
 harsh reply, " Down where all the rats are." 
 What Ibsen may or may not be figuring in 
 this Eat- wife who, it must be noted, 
 is faithfully equipped with the " evil eye " 
 complete has vexed and perplexed many 
 and many a critic and commentator. Of 
 the various constructions - put upon this 
 unlovely but powerfully and wonderfully 
 drawn character not more of a persona 
 grdta than are most of the subsidiary per- 
 sonages that one meets with in Ibsen the 
 idea of Mr. F. C. Constable strikes me as
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 127 
 
 both beautiful and appropriate. He has 
 said, " Does not, then, the Rat-wife 
 symbolize the action and justify the action 
 of apparently cruel fate ? Is it not sug- 
 gested that fate, so apparently cruel, is 
 from an unknown, merciful God ? Accept- 
 ing this view, it would appear that the 
 fact of the Rat-wife having killed her 
 sweetheart, and afterwards used the dog, 
 symbolizes man's loss of past belief in fate 
 as loving and loved, and his present belief 
 in material chance. . . . The moral, I sub- 
 mit, is clear. Borgheim, engaged in public 
 duty, is happy the man living as God 
 would have us live is simple and natural. 
 Rita, self-involved in sensuous love ; 
 Alfred, self-involved in priggish personal 
 ambition, are unhappy. When the two put 
 before themselves work for duty, happiness 
 glimmers before them ; and perhaps I do 
 not wish to be brutal work in the future 
 has warmed Allmers and cooled Rita."
 
 128 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Nowhere else in contemporary literature 
 is the very heart and core of parenthood 
 probed with such earnestness, fearlessness, 
 intensity, or extraordinary power as is the 
 case in Little Eyolf by our maligned Nor- 
 wegian. The little figure a small life, be 
 it remembered, that flickers out at the 
 close of the first act, to the mournful cry, 
 " The crutch is floating!" upon which 
 the very pith and kernel of the drama 
 pivots, is one of singular felicity. 1 It was 
 a master stroke to fill Eyolf 's brain with 
 dreams of soldiering "when I grow big." 
 The tears come as we picture the frail, 
 crippled little frame shouldering the crutch 
 as he spiritedly says to his papa, " Ah, but 
 when I grow big, then I shall have to be 
 a soldier. You know that, don't you ? " 
 There was the touch of an artist hand, too, 
 in dressing Eyolf as a young soldier. 
 
 1 This making the child's death a central incident 
 is reminiscent of Brand.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 129 
 
 "All the best that's in you goes into 
 thinking," exclaims Eyolf s father to him- 
 self, in a fine outburst of self-reproach at 
 his inability to settle to the work of his 
 book on " Human Eesponsibility " as he 
 would wish. " What you put on paper is 
 worth very little," he adds, with infinite 
 pathos. The small world where he was 
 environed by the burning fire of Eita's 
 passionate, jealous love on the one hand, 
 by his own equation and his unsatisfied 
 ideals on the other, was altogether too 
 confined for a man of Allmers' stamp. And 
 in the last act of all, after he has confessed 
 to Bita the hard bitter truth that he 
 wooed her for the sake of her " gold and 
 green forests," he tells her of a day and a 
 night that he once spent alone "in the 
 heart of the great mountains." There at 
 least he could be content. The material 
 husk, the lower range of life, had dropped 
 away from him, and he was almost happy. 
 
 E
 
 130 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Thus and thus he speaks to his wondering 
 wife 
 
 " I came to a wide, dreary mountain-lake and 
 that lake I had to cross. But I could not, for there 
 was neither a boat nor any one there. Then I went 
 without any guidance into a side valley. I thought 
 that by that way I could push on over the heights 
 and between the peaks. . . . And at last I thought 
 I should never see the face of man again. ... I 
 had no fear. Here went death and I, it seemed to 
 me, like two good fellow-travellers. It all seemed 
 so natural so simple, I thought. In my family 
 we don't live to be old." 
 
 In this wonderful piece of self-analysis, we 
 scarcely need to be told what is the " lake" 
 that Ibsen desires to figure to us. Note, too, 
 AUmers' guiding thought that by that 
 way he " could push on over the heights 
 and between the peaks ; " but it was of no 
 avail. It may be cheaply said that it is 
 crass foolishness to become too much en- 
 tangled up in one's own conscience. This 
 is a fault, if a fault it be, commonest of all
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 131 
 
 with Ibsen's personages ; but it is at the 
 same moment a "fault" that humanizes 
 and vitalizes them for us, and that therefore 
 makes most of all for the peculiar beat of 
 the pulse with which the reading and the 
 representation of Ibsen affects us. " To 
 be yourself is to lose yourself," as Peer 
 G-ynt has it. 
 
 The discovery, late in the play-story, 
 that the girl Asta is not, as has been 
 supposed, the half-sister of Allmers, is a 
 master-stroke of construction. It is not 
 dissimilar to the brilliantly daring stroke 
 whereby Mr. Pinero the learner from 
 Ibsen, remember introduces a new element 
 into Mrs. Tanqueray, in the declaration of 
 Ardale's former relations with the pro- 
 tagonist. The results are, however, widely 
 dissimilar. For Asta and the self- 
 communing, distracted, ' ' wife - ridden ' ' 
 Allmers stand aghast at the dread 
 knowledge that they love each other
 
 132 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 even as lovers love one another. Con- 
 vention must have whispered in the 
 author's ear, "Let them sin, and then 
 drag in the Nemesis, an' it please you." 
 Ibsen knows no conventions, however. 
 He keeps Asta a slight but perfect 
 portrait in purity and womanliness pure 
 and holy to the end, and we have a vision 
 of her going off to join her true lover, 
 Borgheim, the engineer. But turbu- 
 lent, wild-willed, exacting Eita Allmers 
 is even now in the transition stage. 
 Brought to a real and abiding knowledge, 
 mixed with keenest remorse, of how 
 criminally she has missed her responsi- 
 bilities to Eyolf, she can at last see 
 the inwardness of her husband's nature. 
 He, stricken with anguish over the loss 
 of the cripple boy on whom he had based 
 so great hopes, more than ever turns 
 towards the " quiet love " of which he has 
 spoken to her before, is less than ever
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 133 
 
 inclined for her outbursts of uncontrolled 
 not uncontrollable passion, and wildest, 
 most selfish jealousy. " Our love has been 
 like a consuming fire now it must be 
 quenched," is his awful but calmly uttered 
 dictum. At first Bit a cannot believe 
 or realize it. She wants, she demands, 
 she must and will have life ! life ! life ! 
 full, complete, perfect, rapturous, " with 
 the wild blood dancing." Yes, and Ibsen 
 spares not. It is Eita that is speak- 
 ing to her sorrow-laden husband: "Do 
 you remember it that entrancingly 
 beautiful hour, Alfred ? " 
 
 " Allmers (recoiling, as if in horror): I remember 
 nothing. I will not remember ! 
 
 "Rita (following him): It was in that hour when 
 your other little Eyolf was crippled for life ! 
 
 " Allmers (in a hollow voice, supporting himself 
 against the table) : Eetribution ! 
 
 " Rita (menacingly) : Yes ; retribution ! " 
 
 Yet for this strange pair it is reserved, 
 at the eleventh hour, to rise on stepping-
 
 134 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 stones of their dead selves. As atonement, 
 they say or rather Allmers says, the 
 wife catching the hushand's enthusiasm 
 only as he proceeds they will get the 
 poorest children out of the streets, and 
 cause them to fill the aching void of 
 Eyolf's loss. This shall be their mission 
 the woman's burden, the man's endurance. 
 And here it is that we quit them. " All or 
 nothing " it is to be for them now even 
 as it had been with Agnes. With her, 
 indeed, well might the stricken, repentant 
 wife of Alfred Allmers exclaim that 
 
 She knows the call 
 
 Of either Nothing or else All.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 AN IBSEN SOCIETY DEMANDED : MB. BEERBOHM 
 TBEE. 
 
 WE who run and read are faced at the 
 outset by an exceedingly complex and 
 interesting problem, or series of problems, 
 as advanced by Ibsen. In the same way 
 that the two elements known as "haste" 
 and "speed" are . as widely sundered as 
 the South is from that North Pole which 
 Ibsen's gallant countryman has been striv- 
 ing to attain, so surely is the receptive 
 faculty of the average reading mind pal- 
 pably parted from the brain-state in 
 which one should sit down to bring the 
 Norwegian dramatist's abstract ideas into 
 closer union with one's own ideas. It is
 
 136 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 easy to feel, and easier to say, that a 
 man's argument is poverty-stricken because 
 it fails to convince yourself ; but when he 
 follows up his advance by an affair of out- 
 posts, and then by an assault in force, you 
 begin to fancy, provided you be moderately 
 honest and well-intentioned, that he is 
 entitled to something more than a mere 
 reconnaissance with firing at long range. 
 
 So is it with Ibsen. While some are 
 asking as to his teaching, and others 
 as to his preaching, other some still 
 vaguely wonder, " What is his mission, and 
 what does he seek to show ? " The answer 
 to each of these questions implies the 
 putting of a fresh query, until he who 
 approaches the Ibsen book-shelf in much 
 the same spirit as he has heretofore 
 approached the book-shelves dedicated, 
 say, to Mill, Carlyle, or Emerson, cries 
 aloud that he knows not what is this 
 plague that has fallen upon him. He
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 137 
 
 sees Ibsen in a glass darkly, and the glass 
 is very, very dark. How to let in the light ! 
 He gropes further and further, stumbling 
 and falling he knows not whither, until 
 he cries out again, and yet more loudly, 
 that the works of this author are gross, 
 undesirable, and fitted not to live. 
 
 That saying is the mark of the natural 
 man. 
 
 Speaking for myself, I do not subscribe 
 to the common impression that Ibsen is 
 " symbolizing " from end to end of his 
 dramatic output. Partly, no doubt, on ac- 
 count of his strict and systematic avoidance 
 of stage conveniences and contrivances 
 partly by reason of the inherent simplicity 
 and straightforwardness of the stories that 
 he unfolds it has been assumed that he 
 utilizes every opportunity to indulge in 
 figurative aspects of life and death. Why 
 should he do so? The great majority of 
 his characters, as middle -class as are the
 
 138 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 characters of Mr. George Gissing, and 
 drawn straight from " Scandinavia in its 
 sordid suburbanism," are intensely and 
 essentially human beings. Shakespeare 
 boldly takes for his types kings and the 
 rulers of princes, seeming only to rest 
 satisfied when exposing the vices and 
 frailties, or appreciating the virtues, of the 
 high ones of the land. Ibsen, on the 
 contrary, deals in everyday, ordinary in- 
 cidents and aspects, concealing nothing 
 because he has nothing to conceal. About 
 the highest rank that he reaches in the 
 social scale is the daughter of a general 
 officer ; and she is made to stand out from 
 the figures grouped around her, just as her 
 father may be supposed to have shone 
 among his grenadiers. She is, in short, the 
 exception that goes to prove the rule, 
 country physicians, well-to-do artisans, and 
 their wives and daughters, being the types 
 invariably depicted.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 139 
 
 It is admissible, however, to go consider- 
 ably further than the very ordinary assertion 
 that Ibsen is a maker of great and living 
 plays. I am distinctly of opinion that he is 
 a maker of actors. For he is endowed in 
 an extraordinary degree with the faculty of 
 writing acceptable acting parts, parts which 
 the player cannot help but feel, and therefore 
 cannot help but render plausible. This fact, 
 for fact it undoubtedly is, applies to the 
 majority of lesser as well as greater Ib- 
 senite characters. Take Brack in Hedda 
 Gabler, Rank in A Doll's House, the girl 
 " Kaia " in The Master-Builder, and (for the 
 sake of comparison) the gruesome figure of 
 the old Eat- wife in Little Eyolf. Each is 
 a gem of characterization, and we never find 
 this dramatist guilty of the grave fault of 
 repeating himself in his characters. It is a 
 virtue not possessed by all. 
 
 If invited to say which of his social plays 
 I take to be the best adapted to stage
 
 140 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 representation, I should probably reply A 
 Doll's House. And in so deciding I should 
 speak with a very open mind indeed, rather 
 than as a partisan swayed by a special and 
 absorbing interest in any one play. The 
 sad story of the toy-wife and of Krogstad 
 contains every one of the elements that 
 make for a genuine stage triumph. Plot, 
 action, and diction alike fit themselves to 
 the exigencies of the life "behind the 
 foot-lights." Indeed, the difference between 
 reading and witnessing these plays is 
 astonishing. Ghosts I have only had the 
 privilege of reading, and can truthfully say 
 that it made a deep and lasting impression 
 upon my mind. But the " imaginative 
 faculty " in Ibsen is surely the most fully 
 and subtly developed in his Master- Builder. 
 In a lecture delivered at the Eoyal Institu- 
 tion in May, 1893, Mr. Beerbohm Tree took 
 occasion to say, in relation to this very 
 imaginative quality when evolved out of the
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 141 
 
 uncongenial soil of Scandinavia, "All the 
 more wonderful is it that the magician 
 should have been able to conjure up from 
 this dank soil, which would appear congenial 
 only to mushroom growth, such wondrous 
 and variegated plants. In witnessing this 
 play we are moved by its power, we are 
 fascinated by its originality. Few fail to 
 feel the thud of its pulse. Each weaves his 
 own version of its message. The master 
 has gained his end ; he has stirred the 
 imagination of his audience, he alone 
 remains sphinx-like, unexplained ; he is the 
 artist wise master ! " 
 
 In conversation with me on the subject 
 
 of this same play of The Master-Builder, 
 Mr. Tree confessed that he was not seriously 
 struck with its representation on his first 
 visit to the theatre ; and he added : 
 
 " Perhaps at that moment the brain and mind 
 may have been divorced from the matter in 
 hand by some counter-influence suggested by the
 
 142 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 auditor's own affairs. However this may have 
 been, I distinctly recollect coming away from the 
 theatre on the second occasion feeling much more 
 than 'deeply impressed' by all that I had seen 
 and heard. So much depends upon the frame of 
 mind, that I shall even venture to crave forgiveness 
 for having, when first I witnessed Die Meistersinger 
 (it was in London), all but dropped off to sleep. 
 Yet, singularly, on the second time of seeing it, at 
 Bayreuth, I felt its magnetism more deeply, and in 
 a greater variety of ways, than can be expressed in 
 words. It then appealed to me, and stirred my 
 cordial emotions to their very depths, in just as 
 great degree as it had failed to do so before; and I 
 could cite other instances of the same kind. But 
 one's mind becomes convoluted, and on these first 
 occasions my battery was certainly not responsive 
 to the electric power wielded by the master-brain 
 of either Wagner or Ibsen was not, so to speak, 
 in a condition to be acutely swayed by the 
 picturesque grandeur of the Nuremberg singing 
 or the weird fantasies indulged by the inexplicable 
 Halvard Solness and his ' girl from Lysanger.' " 
 
 Another word upon the question of Keal- 
 ism versus Idealism. Henrik Ibsen is the 
 artist : he creates, and it is not necessary
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 143 
 
 for him to produce anything savouring of 
 the self-conscious. To symbolize is the 
 work of the commentator, not of the artist, 
 and the one frequently lacks the imagina- 
 tion with which the other is gifted. The 
 artist must get his effect at all cost. 
 Whether he subscribe to letters, art, the 
 stage, or politics, this must be the case. 
 Perhaps the story of Mr. Frank Holl and 
 the bishop illustrates best the difficulty 
 that will sometimes beset the artist when 
 striving for an effect which he feels positive 
 is lurking in the vicinity, but which is still 
 unattained. His sitter heard Mr. Holl using 
 certain striking words. " I wish you would 
 not use such language," quoth the bishop. 
 "I am not swearing at your lordship," 
 replied the painter, aggrievedly, " but at this 
 
 d d picture." And when it comes, this 
 
 long longed-for effect if it is going to be a 
 masterpiece comes simply, solidly, with no 
 blare of trumpets, no mere aids to effective-
 
 144 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 ness. For have not the most tuneful 
 poems ever penned, the finest pictures ever 
 painted, the greatest inventions ever given 
 to the world, been distinguished by this 
 quality of simplicity ? One notices that the 
 same characteristics often overshadow the 
 lives of many great men. But the gift of 
 thinking with the author whose imaginative 
 work is unfolded before you of thinking 
 with him in every phase of thought and 
 every direction in which he wills that you 
 should follow him is indisputably essential 
 to a right interpretation of the whole. 
 
 So much has been said and written in 
 regard to the difficulty of " comprehending " 
 Ibsen's work, that the ordinary thinking 
 mind will without any difficulty recall that 
 it is not unprecedented in this country to 
 form a literary society with the avowed 
 object of conducting investigations into the 
 " inner transcendentalism " of the works of 
 a living author ! Artemus Ward, it will be
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 145 
 
 recollected, tells of a painter who at long 
 last was constrained to admit that the 
 object which he had immortalized on canvas 
 was " a horse." Well, why not an Ibsen 
 Society, primarily formed, if you will, for 
 the purpose of " discovering " the true 
 trend of that genius of which so many have 
 acquired a mistaken notion? This can 
 scarcely be called a " plea " for an Ibsen 
 Society, seeing that we live in a state of 
 "society" which is nothing but Societies. 
 England has its Shakespeare, Byron, Brown- 
 ing, and other societies; while America 
 cherishes, unless I am mistaken, its Walt 
 Whitman Society. It may be objected that 
 Ibsen is not an English author. The mani- 
 fest reply is that in a community where 
 thousands of copies of that Master-Builder , 
 which is also his masterpiece, were disposed 
 of in a few months, the interest in the 
 Norwegian dramatist's work is far greater 
 than in any other European country
 
 146 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 excepting his own an interest that has 
 only been fanned by the fierce controversy 
 waged around his name. It was the per- 
 sistent hurling, from the very first, of 
 this frenzy of execration (as Mr. Archer 
 happily calls it) at the dramatist's 
 devoted head, that largely inspired, as it 
 subsequently deepened, my interest in him. 
 Ghosts, one of his most vivid and deep- 
 reaching pictures, had been published, and 
 already it was bruited abroad that such 
 writings were equally injudicious and per- 
 nicious. In some directions these epithets 
 are still applied to the same man and in the 
 same manner. In France, where the in- 
 terest in Ibsen's work has grown with their 
 growth, perhaps there already is an Ibsen 
 Society such as the one suggested for this 
 country. If in France, how much the more 
 in England ! Madame Bernhardt, herself a 
 delightful Ibsen impersonator, has said that 
 we English take his plays, like other plays
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 147 
 
 and other things, too seriously. If so, then 
 it is all the more remarkable that these 
 dramas should, to employ a cheap phrase, 
 have " caught on " among our Gallic 
 cousins to such an extraordinary extent ! 
 Their reviews and magazines, equally with 
 ours, have been full of Ibsenite essays and 
 the opinions of many. It is true, too, that 
 their recent Drama has been palpably in- 
 fluenced by the same cause that has in- 
 fluenced our own, though possibly to a less 
 extent. We go further south, and it is the 
 same. Not long since I was reading 
 Echegaray's A Son of Don Juan, and was 
 struck by its close resemblance to Ghosts. 
 It was palpable that the Figure from the 
 North had played upon the Spanish author, 
 as he had played upon the French and 
 English ones,"and the reader could not help 
 regarding this work as another tribute to 
 Ibsen's genius. To say, then, that he has 
 influenced and is influencing the contem-
 
 148 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 porary drama enormously, is to record a 
 very ordinary truth. It would be folly to 
 attempt to depreciate that influence an 
 influence, as I firmly believe, for good, and 
 not for evil. But let me again quote from 
 Mr. Beerbohm Tree's remarks to myself: 
 
 "It may seem strange that An Enemy of the 
 People, differing so markedly from the other social 
 plays, should be the one Ibsen production yet pre- 
 sented upon the Haymarket stage. It is not to be 
 supposed that German actors or German commen- 
 tators are more exact and infallible than those of 
 other countries ; but I enjoyed the privilege of seeing 
 An Enemy of the People played in Germany by a 
 German company, and played exceedingly well. 
 The story of the man whose idea of beauty to his 
 native town leads to results so peculiar, again 
 appealed to my instincts and emotions; and the 
 subsequent production in London was more suc- 
 cessful than could have been anticipated. It was 
 noticeable, moreover, that the performers them- 
 selves quickly became interested, even fascinated 
 in some instances, it may be, in spite of them- 
 selves. So forcible, so straightforward was it as 
 to claim their respect at the same time that it 
 enchained their attention."
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 149 
 
 Great in himself, Ibsen may be said to 
 be the cause of greatness in others. His 
 power of characterization is so vivid and 
 spontaneous that the actor can hardly go 
 astray. 
 
 In America they are, on the whole, not 
 yet " ready " for Ibsen. It is true that 
 America has given us one of the most 
 graceful among Ibsenite actresses, but this 
 is only another of the exceptions. It is 
 true also that in Chicago of all places ! 
 An Enemy of the People made a deeper 
 impression than any of the "legitimate" 
 pieces presented by Mr. Tree on that tour. 
 Nevertheless, in the United States the 
 general attitude of the intelligent multi- 
 tude towards the Norwegian is one of 
 indifference. That is to say, not from the 
 standpoint that there is anything about his 
 work peculiarly calling for avoidance, but 
 because it is not the kind of mental pap on 
 which they have been weaned, or towards
 
 150 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 which they can be pointed without apply- 
 ing the spur. So that in America, where 
 exigencies and susceptibilities do not often 
 admit stage heroines of the Tess type, 
 the spur is waiting to be applied. They do 
 not refuse to listen to him, but they do not 
 wish to be made aware of his coming. 
 
 Then we have the question of the moral 
 and the immoral. You can no more assert 
 that Ibsen's tendency is not " good " than 
 you can seriously say that the tendency of 
 Greek tragedy is improper. It is terrible, 
 if you like so is Ibsen, sometimes. The 
 bent of him can be so lofty as to irritate 
 the mind of the average spectator. " I am 
 a poet," says Ibsen's countryman Bjornsen, 
 " not because I write verse so many people 
 can do that but because all that concerns 
 humanity concerns me.' 1 Bjornson merely re- 
 peats what the greater poet has been saying 
 throughout his life. "All that concerns 
 humanity" is the comprehensive "all"
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 151 
 
 that concerns Ibsen. He is the poet of 
 " the sere, the yellow leaf." And how little 
 do we know about the real Ibsen ! We 
 know that the political feud so long existent 
 between the houses of Ibsen and Bjornson 
 was happily ended by the marriage of the 
 former's son to the latter's daughter. We 
 know that his first play, the historical 
 Catalina, was produced at Christiania forty- 
 five years ago, when he was only twenty- 
 two. We know that he drifted away from 
 his native land, and that in 1866 the 
 Storthing pensioned him. These, and 
 details like these, are of the baldest and 
 most trivial, his biographers never seeming 
 to pierce the veil that conceals the true 
 Ibsen. The true Ibsen is indeed a won- 
 drous complexity. I would even go the 
 length of suggesting that Scandinavia was 
 created that Ibsen might be ! For Scandi- 
 navia is a troublous place, designed, as it 
 were, for turbulent folk. Again, " What is
 
 152 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 this man's religion ? " ask some. " He has 
 none," reply others, with a sweep of the 
 eyehrows and a snort of contempt. I sub- 
 mit that Ibsen's creed is that of the artist. 
 He does not question, he does not doubt ; 
 but, as Whistler said of ; Leighton, "he 
 paints." He is only the painter and the 
 painter may depict a Madonna without 
 being absolutely convinced that his model 
 is immaculate. If the author of Little 
 Eyolf be not an earnest religionist, how are 
 the closing words of that fine play explained 
 away?
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE THEEE GROUPS. 
 
 FEEIDEICH NIETSZCHE has said of Wagner 
 that he "immeasurably increased the 
 speaking-power of Music." May it not be 
 similarly said of Ibsen that he has im- 
 measurably increased the speaking-power of 
 the Drama ? The comparison is, I submit, 
 an apt one. For just as Wagner plays 
 upon the highest emotions, the deepest 
 sensibilities, by the power of his art, so 
 does Ibsen interpret them by means of his. 
 Both masters demonstrate to us so fully 
 the difference between dramatic and 
 theatrical effect. 
 
 It is observable, upon the other hand, 
 that Miss Marie Corelli "hates William
 
 154 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Archer and his god Ibsen." It is scarcely 
 likely that my cultured acquaintance, Mr. 
 William Archer, will sink and die under the 
 weight of this gifted, but unfortunately 
 prejudiced, authoress's harsh criticism. Like 
 unto "his god Ibsen," the brilliant trans- 
 lator and erudite man of letters is by this 
 time fully inured to the tribulations in- 
 flicted by the wordy weapons of the unjust 
 and the uninformed. The term "unin- 
 formed " is here employed in the converse 
 sense to "misinformed," in the same way 
 that one speaks of Ibsen's teachings as 
 unmoral a far different thing to the im- 
 moral. But Max Norda and Marie Corelli 
 have spoken ! 
 
 Mr. Havelock Ellis divides the plays into 
 three groups, for convenience' sake. These 
 groups are : (1) historical and legendary 
 dramas ; (2) dramatic poems ; (3) social 
 dramas. Of the first division it is un- 
 necessary to say more than a passing word,
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 155 
 
 albeit I claim to be an enthusiastic student 
 
 of them all. They are little known in this 
 
 country, and it is not by them that any 
 
 widespread fame has been won by their 
 
 author. First of all we have Catalina, 
 
 dating back to 1850, and marred, it must 
 
 be owned, by much of youthfulness and 
 
 inexperience, without the faintest, or more 
 
 than the very faintest, promise of the 
 
 stronger and so different work to follow. 
 
 Second, we have Lady Inger of Ostraat, 
 
 in which the still young pen of Ibsen 
 
 exhibits considerable mastery of technique 
 
 in a melodramatic field. The Feast of 
 
 Solhang, whose argument takes us back 
 
 into the fourteenth century, is practically 
 
 unknown in this country. The Vikings at 
 
 Helgeland and The Pretenders contain some 
 
 splendid work. In the one, Ibsen sings, or 
 
 rather speaks, the Saga of the Volsung, 
 
 which in our own land William Morris has 
 
 put to such noble use, and this, too, is of
 
 156 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 remarkable interest in the light of the fact 
 that, nearly thirty years afterwards, Ibsen 
 returns to the Viking theme when he makes 
 Solness remark to Hilda that " those fellows 
 must have had 'robust consciences,' if 
 you like." (Hilda opines that "that must 
 have been thrilling." " What, to carry off 
 women, as the Vikings did?" demands 
 Halvard. " No, to be carried off!") The 
 Pretenders excited a great deal of com- 
 ment, partly because at that time (1864) 
 Denmark was being humbled by the rising 
 military greatness of Prussia, and Ibsen did 
 not scruple to apply the perils and con- 
 troversies of the Norse period of which he 
 wrote to current politics. Emperor and 
 Galilean is better known here than either 
 of the above-named. It is of great length, 
 and in it, as the title denotes, Ibsen takes 
 us to old Rome, where he works out a 
 tragedy that of Julian the Apostate more 
 stupendous, even more prolonged, than
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 157 
 
 Shakespeare's Henry VI. It occurs to the 
 writer, in passing, that it would be just as 
 reasonable to accuse Mr. Wilson Barrett of 
 having pirated Emperor and Galilean for the 
 purposes of his The Sign of the Cross 
 as it is to bring against Ibsen the baseless 
 charges that have been brought. And Mr. 
 Barrett is not an Ibsenite ! 
 
 In his second group Mr. Havelock Ellis 
 places but three productions Brand; the 
 weird, introspective, and enormously power- 
 ful Peer Gynt ; and another dramatic poem, 
 Love's Comedy, written (1862) presumably 
 before Ibsen had gained the greater 
 strength requisite for Brand. In Love's 
 Comedy y Ibsen for the first time satirizes 
 himself and all around him. For this, 
 and for the lightness of touch employed, 
 the piece is principally noteworthy. It 
 should have, but has not, a reading vogue 
 in England. As much as it instances any- 
 thing, it instances the author's versatility.
 
 158 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 Turn we now to the third group indi- 
 cated for us by Mr. Ellis. These now 
 number, roughly speaking, a dozen, and 
 it may be well to set out their titles 
 together with the dates of their publica- 
 tion : 
 
 The League of Youth 1869 
 
 The Pillars of Society 1877 
 
 A Doll's House 1879 
 
 Ghosts 1881 
 
 An Enemy of 'the People 1882 
 
 The Wild Duck 1884 
 
 Rosmersholm ... ... ... 1886 
 
 The Lady from the Sea 1888 
 
 Hedda GaUer 1890 
 
 The Master-Builder 1892 
 
 Little Eyolf 1894 
 
 John Gabriel Borkman ... ... 1896 
 
 Most of these are fully discussed on 
 other pages of this appreciation, both by 
 myself and by my collaborator. In the 
 first on the list, Ibsen takes up the cause 
 of Young Norway in no laggard or 
 niggardly spirit, and with a fearlessness
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 159 
 
 that in his own country even then found 
 him many admirers and supporters. At 
 first, though, it did not gain a fair hearing 
 upon the stage. Still, when the poet 
 visited Norway, in 1874, ten years after 
 his voluntary self-exile, he was received 
 with the wildest enthusiasm at a public 
 performance of The League of Youth. In 
 The Pillars of Society, where the dramatist 
 begins to inveigh against the evils and 
 the torments of life as ordinarily lived, 
 in a kind of advanced Tennysonian stage 
 
 (" Cursed be the social wants that sin against the 
 strength of youth ! 
 
 Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the 
 living truth ! 
 
 Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest 
 Nature's rule ! 
 
 Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd fore- 
 head of the fool ! ") 
 
 my friend Sir Edward Russell thinks 
 that he finds the most human female 
 character in the whole of Ibsen. Be this
 
 160 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 as it may, The Pillars of Society (a good 
 translation, by the way, of the bitingly 
 satirical title of Samfundets St otter) is a 
 milestone, and a sufficiently noteworthy 
 one, upon the steep road which the author 
 has climbed. In The Lady from the Sea 
 we meet with the young girl whom Ibsen 
 subsequently develops into the Hilda 
 of The Master-Builder. This questionable 
 practice of repeating a personage in a later 
 work is not often indulged in by Ibsen : 
 he does it, however, with great effec- 
 tiveness in An Enemy of the People, 
 where he reintroduces the printer Aslaksen 
 whom we have already encountered in 
 The League of Youth a perfect portrait 
 of a time-serving knave. This Enemy of 
 the People is one of the three or four 
 " plays from the North " that have been 
 accorded full justice upon the English 
 stage. The lights and shades of Dr. 
 Stockmann's sturdy, resolute, lovable per-
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 161 
 
 sonality are sketched in with extraordinary 
 insight and consummate naturalness. 
 
 "D the compact majority ! " exclaims 
 
 the irate " enemy " of his native town, 
 as he seee his plans for the betterment 
 of his fellows killed by municipal back- 
 slidings and the self-serving abuses of the 
 Town Council's " majority." Stockmann 
 will not poison, or consent to have 
 poisoned, the little town that his skill, 
 energy, and large-heartedness have helped 
 to build and make grow. Therefore he 
 is hounded from the place, his windows 
 broken, himself subjected to mob-violence. 
 What does he reply to his critics, as the 
 curtain descends ? " No man is so strong 
 as he who stands most alone ! " May we, 
 any of us, deserve it ! for the words come 
 straight from the plucky doctor's heart. 
 There is no symbolism here : it is the 
 plain straightforward story of an everyday, 
 ordinary creature, who was brave as he 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 was just, poor as he was honest. This 
 work "stands alone" even as its central 
 character does, and the humour of it is 
 unique. 
 
 RosmersJiolm is another eminently act- 
 able play. We read it to its close with 
 a mingling and tingling of sensations. At 
 the last word of the last page we lay 
 it down with a shudder. "Eosmer of 
 Rosmersholm " and Rebecca West have 
 gone into the mill-race, locked in one 
 another's arms the inexorable " white 
 horses of Eosmersholm " have engulfed 
 them, and we hold our breath as we seem 
 to hear Eebecca's final, stifled shriek 
 as she yields herself to the cold cruel 
 waters. There is no sin, or suggestion of 
 sinning, here. It is true that the fear 
 of sinning, and the horror of it, have been 
 before Eebecca's eyes : and now, when 
 both are tree, she cannot bear to accept 
 the love that is to her as she proves by
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 163 
 
 her death more than life or the hereafter. 
 Grim with a great grimness is the tragedy ; 
 but Eebecca's is a nature that forces 
 her into a consummation that she feels 
 to be the only way out. It is death or 
 madness and in choosing the former, 
 does she not take the next best thing to 
 life as she understands it ? 
 
 In Ghosts, many a man finds the embodi- 
 ment of himself and of his own past. 
 " The sins of the fathers " these are what 
 live over again as " ghosts." They are not 
 mere phantoms or phantasies. They are 
 those eerie " again-goers " gengangarde, as 
 the Norse tongue has it whose tremulous 
 forms are beheld of men while the world is 
 quietening into shadowland. Ghosts should 
 have and I, for one, firmly believe that it 
 has effected a great moral and social 
 good. Ibsen did not fear to exploit a sub- 
 ject not previously treated in terms accept- 
 able to the society of lie and tradition
 
 164 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 and convention. Occasionally it is hor- 
 rible, but how vivid, how far-reaching, 
 how marvellously analytical ! There was 
 hostility towards Ibsen from Norway her- 
 self upon its publication in 1881, but not 
 for long. Now his countrymen kiss his 
 feet where once they doubted and con- 
 demned; and the special train that con- 
 veyed the manuscript of one of his later 
 works * to the publishers was garlanded 
 by the affectionate hands of numerous 
 adherents. 
 
 I should like to reproduce here some 
 words of a distinguished Ibsenite actor, 
 Mr. Herbert Waring, in describing to me 
 his sensations on a first acquaintance with 
 A Doll's House : 
 
 " At about eleven p.m. on a hot night in early 
 summer I began to read the play, and I remember 
 the sense of ineffable weariness which oppressed 
 me when I laid the book aside for a moment at 
 
 * Tlie Master-Builder, I believe.
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 165 
 
 the end of the first act. At this time, I am 
 ashamed to say, Ibsen was hardly even a name 
 to me. I had heard vague rumours of a Scandi- 
 navian dramatist who could never be popular in 
 this country, but who had already found an 
 eloquent apostle in the person of one of our most 
 erudite and discriminating critics. I had, I am 
 afraid, taken but little notice of these reports, 
 being possibly more interested in my own progress 
 than in the advancement of the drama. 
 
 " Where on earth, I thought, could any man, 
 much less a thoughtful critic or an aspiring 
 manager, discover any merit in this bald and 
 trivial piece ? The childish inanities of the 
 Helmer menage, the intolerably tedious conver- 
 sation between Nora and Mrs. Linden, the 
 priggish morality of the commonplace husband, 
 the primitive frivolity of the macaroon-eating 
 wife, the uncomfortable self-revelation of the 
 doctor, whom I already resolved to discard (my 
 choice lay between Rank and Helmer), could 
 these things have any dramatic purport, feebly 
 illuminated, as they were, by the dullest and most 
 prosaic dialogue ? It is true that the figure of 
 Krogstad already stood out in bold and most 
 welcome relief, as a strong and dominant character, 
 and the scene between him and Nora was not 
 dramatically uninteresting ; so there was some
 
 1 66 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 very slight stimulus to continue the reading of 
 the play. 
 
 " The second act I found a little more interest- 
 ing. There was more life and movement in it. 
 The episode of the tarantella was fairly exciting, 
 and Nora's desperate position contained some 
 element of tragic import. The extraordinary scene 
 between Nora and Eank increased my aversion 
 to the latter gentleman, and I was quite deter- 
 mined that no quantity of wild horses should drag 
 me on to the stage in his unhappy and revolting 
 person. But I approached the third act with no 
 very sanguine feelings. Of course the crash would 
 come as it always came, the husband whom the 
 author had not idealism enough to make a decent 
 Jew would take the onus on himself, Krogstad 
 would retire in discomfiture, and the drama would 
 hasten to its very obvious and commonplace finale. 
 " I finished the play with very mixed sensations. 
 I was irritated at the failure of my own confident 
 prognostications, puzzled by the unconventional 
 denouement, and uneasily impressed by the dawning 
 conviction that I had treated lightly something 
 which was very great indeed. I read the play 
 straight through a second time into the small 
 hours of the morning, with a degree of interest 
 and excitement which I can honestly say I have 
 never before or since experienced, either in the
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 167 
 
 perusal or representation of any play. Every 
 monosyllable in the terse and pungent dialogue 
 opened up a fresh thought or revealed some 
 hidden depth of character ; and there, whether for 
 good or ill, whether its effects might be ennobling 
 or debasing, was a complete and well-made play, 
 constructed with masterly ingenuity, and teeming 
 with vital human interest. Nevertheless, the 
 piece was rehearsed by the company with no very 
 sanguine feelings, and the ordinary terrors of a 
 first night's performance were no doubt accen- 
 tuated by the unconventional nature of the experi- 
 ment. In spite, however, of the preponderance of 
 hostile criticism, which ranged from downright 
 condemnation to the faintest of faint praise, the 
 new drama proved undeniably attractive ; and 
 from that time the name of Ibsen has been, more 
 or less, a name to conjure with." 
 
 Note, too, the fine portraiture always 
 employed when Ibsen wishes to introduce 
 to us a clerical or religious personage, 
 whether as protagonist or merely subsidiary. 
 Are they ever stagey conventions, are they 
 ever caricatures or colourless, these priests ? 
 Never. They are invariably equipped with
 
 1 68 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 a definite raison d'etre in the working-out 
 of the play-scheme proper, and consequently 
 they rarely jar. But, take Ibsen through 
 and through, I do not fancy that you will 
 find many of his characters who have not 
 a definite, if not always a sympathetic, 
 mission. He is not like Bjornson, "never 
 too far in advance of his fellows." As Mr. 
 Havelock Ellis would say, Ibsen stands 
 alone "in the darkness in front." But 
 alone he does stand. " Alone " he is des- 
 tined to die, as he has lived. But he will 
 never die out. The motto of the Cardinal 
 de Eohan might well be his : " Je ne puis 
 Roi,je ne daigne Prince, je suis Ibsen."
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE LATEST PLAY. 
 I. 
 
 IBSEN has not lost his grip. It is as strong 
 as ever in the drama called John Gabriel 
 Borkman after the principal character ; and 
 John Gabriel Borkman is an idealized 
 Jabez Balfour. Perhaps this does injustice 
 to Jabez Balfour, for he may have had 
 ideas as enthusiastic and lofty as John 
 Borkman had. Let it not be supposed 
 that because the hero of the play is a 
 broken-down financier there is no female 
 interest. Perhaps this would be an un- 
 safe assumption even in the Balfour case. 
 Those who had the task of going through 
 the papers of Jabez are said to have found
 
 170 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 evidence that the versatility of that remark- 
 able man had developments of a kind quite 
 remote from unsentimental business. In 
 the case of Borkman there is no sug- 
 gestion of any general weakness on the 
 erotic side of the character. The proba- 
 bilities as suggested by the play are against 
 such an idea. But there are two women 
 interested in Borkman two women who 
 have " fought a life-and-death battle for 
 his soul," and though the renewed struggle 
 in the actual play is very perfunctory, and 
 is complicated and deranged by another 
 woman with whom Borkman is not con- 
 cerned, the interest created and sustained 
 by the love aspect of the man's life is 
 powerful, and its working is very subtle. 
 If a theory were to be propounded on the 
 subject, it would probably be that while his 
 love affairs had little weight with his will, 
 they had a great effect upon his destiny. 
 His wife, whatever she may have been at
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 171 
 
 an earlier period, is now perfectly rigid, 
 regarding the conduct of her husband as 
 unpardonable, and cherishing no hope 
 except that of bringing up her son to rein- 
 state the honour of the name. A much 
 more interesting character is this wife's 
 sister, who really loves John Gabriel 
 Borkman, and does not know why he 
 preferred her sister. 
 
 The scene in which this phenomenon is 
 explained reveals curious depths of charac- 
 ter. The phenomenon occurred, not as so 
 many things of the kind occur, by caprice 
 or accident, but through a distinct subordi- 
 dation of the financier's duty as a lover to 
 the supposed necessities of his ambition. 
 If the play has a moral, it is that a man 
 who thus trifles with love is likely to pay 
 heavy penalties that do not seem germane 
 to the sorrows of love, either successful 
 or unsuccessful. Borkman, though suffi- 
 ciently under the influence of his affection
 
 172 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 to reserve the property of the one who is 
 dearest to him from the general submersion 
 and loss of all the other property entrusted 
 to him, bears the loss of this dearest one 
 with scarcely chequered philosophy. His 
 love, however, in spite of his selling it 
 for a worldly advantage, brings upon him 
 calamities which he cannot regard with 
 philosophy the calamities of ruin, in fact. 
 And while his wife is about him utterly 
 unforgiving, and he is pacing his living- 
 room brooding over hopeless projects for 
 his rehabilitation, he is confronted by the 
 woman who would have borne all adversities 
 by his side, and will still, but who charges 
 him upon his own testimony with the 
 greatest of crimes the destruction of the 
 love-life of another human being. It is 
 curious how consistently the ruined man 
 is all but indifferent to the agony of the 
 once-loved, perhaps still-loved, woman who 
 is all devotion to him, and who certainly
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 173 
 
 has no rival in his heart. When, after 
 a struggle has taken place between the 
 two sisters for the possession and control 
 of Borkman's son, this young man is 
 carried off from both of them by a very 
 wanton lady, who echoes his own clamours 
 for a pleasant and independent life, Bork- 
 man, in that fashion of roaming upwards 
 into the mists and snows which is Ibsen's 
 most frequent expression of bewildered 
 consciousness and erratic will, conducts 
 Ella, the sister-in-law, up to a height 
 where, in the days of early courtship, they 
 used to survey the prospect, and there, 
 while the sad woman recalls then* old 
 imaginings as she thought, of love he 
 recalls them as occupied solely with the 
 business of material wealth. " It was the 
 dreamland of our life," says she, "and now 
 that land is buried in snow, and the old 
 tree is dead." But he sees ships, and 
 fancies the treasures in the depths of mines.
 
 174 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 The ships " come and go. They weave a 
 network of fellowship all round the world. 
 They shed light and warmth over the souls 
 of men in many thousands of homes. That 
 was what I dreamed of doing." So that it 
 is possible for a Borkman to have great 
 dreams of practical philanthropy, though 
 he may be capable of felony in the process ; 
 and though he can be indifferent to the 
 spiritual wealth of love, he loves the wealth 
 of the mines he had hoped to work, " loves 
 them unborn as they lie yearning for the 
 light with all their shining train of power 
 and glory." He " loves them, loves them, 
 loves them " and then dies. 
 
 I have hazarded a guess that this play 
 will not excite so much animosity in 
 England as others of the author. And 
 those who are free from prepossession will 
 acknowledge it to be a fine and tragic 
 performance, ploughing deep into true 
 human experience. But there are two
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 175 
 
 passages which may fairly excite disgust. 
 They are difficult to criticize. In one the 
 financier, when he is considering in retro- 
 spect the loss he made of the woman he 
 really loved, remarks that one woman 
 would have done afterwards as well as 
 another. This is an outrage on feeling. 
 Is it not an exaggeration even of any 
 feeling Borkinan could possibly have had ? 
 If so, it is contrary to art, because offen- 
 sively departing from truth. In the other 
 case, a lady of very light character, though 
 not previously actually of ill life, takes 
 away a young girl with her in eloping, and 
 suggests that she will serve for her own 
 lover to fall back upon when tired of her. 
 This is terribly foul, and surely not less 
 foolish; for what woman would say such 
 a thing, even if we can conceive a woman 
 feeling it? A suggestion such as this is 
 more offensive than passages of supposed 
 indelicacy which have been objected to
 
 176 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 in some of the other plays. Ibsen holds 
 a rank which keeps dogmatism aloof as 
 to anything that he deliberately puts into 
 his dialogue; but it is difficult to avoid 
 concluding that the detail to which we 
 have objected is as improbable as it is 
 unpleasant. Happily, the great structure 
 and purport of the piece, while full of 
 pessimism as to actualities, is full of 
 optimism in its ideals, and its harrowing 
 enactment of morally ruined mature lives, 
 and of an immature life lightly ruining 
 itself, is in the highest and best spirit of 
 teaching by examples to avoid. 
 
 The theme has a nearer relation to 
 common life than has been found in 
 previous plays of Ibsen, which were busy 
 mainly with what to people who suppose 
 themselves healthy appear to be mere 
 whimsies of a diseased sentimentalism. 
 There is a whimsy quality in John Gabriel 
 jBorkman, and almost all of its sentiment is
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 177 
 
 diseased. " Healthy " people, however, 
 are less annoyed and more interested in 
 phenomena of this kind when they arise 
 out of such adventures and experiences 
 as those of an ambitious, ruined company- 
 promoter, than when they seem to come 
 more directly from gratuitously indulged, 
 morbid idiosyncracy. 
 
 Any one who wishes for a purely dramatic 
 sensation may have it by reading the first 
 scene with the last scene of the play, 
 where Borkman dies broken-hearted in 
 the snow. 
 
 With consummate art the action of the 
 play is limited to one evening, and what- 
 ever revelation is necessary is achieved 
 almost without narrative, and made vividly 
 clear because of the intense bearing of the 
 past upon the present in almost all the 
 characters. 
 
 The touches in which Borkman dis- 
 criminates, according to his callous idea, 
 
 N
 
 178 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 between a man's and a woman's attitude 
 towards love ; and perceives how one may 
 act in faith and unfaith at once (as he in 
 reference to Ella's property), and with a 
 fatuous grossness, which she promptly 
 exposes, pronounces that one woman will 
 do as well as another; are among the 
 strongest things in modern drama. 
 
 There is an incident in the last act, 
 which alone in this play is likely to evoke 
 that disgust which in reference to Ibsen 
 lies so near the surface of the average 
 English mind. It is on this wise : When 
 Borkman's son, in the favourite Norwegian 
 cant, as it seems, declares his intention 
 of "living his life," that is to say, of 
 frankly eloping with a married woman 
 seven years his senior, it has also been 
 arranged by the eloping young matron 
 that they shall be accompanied by a 
 young girl to whom young Borkman has 
 been very kind, and who is the daughter
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 179 
 
 of his father's old friend. When Erhart's 
 mother hears this she smiles a knowing 
 smile in the midst of her mortification. 
 In spite of her hardness, she is a woman 
 of real as well as imperious dignity, but, 
 as with many hard people, her ideas are 
 coarse. And so she smiles significantly 
 at the thought of the young girl accom- 
 panying the eloping couple. Strangely 
 and audaciously the aerial matron, heing 
 a philosopher in her kind a sort of flighty 
 Madame de Warens fully justifies Mrs. 
 Borkman's sardonic suggestion, which, with 
 another malignant smile, the latter puts 
 into words 
 
 "Mrs. Borkman (ivith a malignant smile): Mrs. 
 Wilton, do you think you are acting quite wisely 
 in taking that girl with you ? 
 
 " Mrs. Wilton (returning the smile, half-ironically, 
 half -seriously) : Men are so unstable, Mrs. Bork- 
 man. And women too. When Erhart is done 
 with me and I with him then it will be well
 
 180 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 for us both that he, poor fellow, should have some 
 one to fall back upon. 
 
 " Mrs. Borkman : But you yourself ? 
 " Mrs. Wilton : Oh, I shall know what to do, I 
 assure you. Good-bye to you all ! 
 
 [She bows and goes out by the hall door. 
 Erhart stands for a moment as though 
 wavering ; then he turns and follows her."] 
 
 This is, morally, the worst thing in the 
 play. 
 
 I am not attempting to tell the whole 
 story in its subtle intertwinings and its 
 incidental heightenings as in the old 
 friend being nearly run over by the 
 closed sleigh in which his young daughter 
 is being carried on her dubious journey 
 some of which heightenings may be 
 regarded, if one pleases, as bits of that 
 Ibsen symbolism which is always on the 
 border-line of Ibsen accident. In the 
 denouement Borkman, pretty well demented, 
 wanders with the one woman who has 
 loved him, and the one woman whom he
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 181 
 
 has come near loving, up a hill, amid the 
 snow, on to a ridge, whence he can see 
 the prospect most closely associated with 
 his unbounded ambition and his narrowly 
 bounded love. There he dies, and there 
 the twin-sisters, wife and sister-in-law, 
 join hands, u two shadows, over the dead 
 
 man." 
 
 E. 11. Iv. 
 
 II. 
 
 It is a harrowing, pitiful story, down to 
 the last line of the final page. If Hal- 
 vard Solness succeeded in erecting for 
 himself a tower of one kind by dint of 
 building upon others so did John Gabriel 
 Borkman for himself a tower of another 
 sort. The financier builds for himself and 
 those to come after him a veritable heritage 
 of shame. He is a sordid pilferer that is 
 the plain Saxon of it. And yet even in him 
 we see the workings of a burning desire to 
 get outside of himself and to be great
 
 1 82 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 according to his lights. To the last he had 
 dreams of a great golden empire, to be 
 founded by him by the financier once 
 so great that men spoke his name as a 
 household word, referring to John Gabriel 
 familiarly, as one would to a favourite 
 statesman or commander. What a fall was 
 his ! and to die 'mid the snow-wreaths at 
 the last. 
 
 Paradoxical though it sounds, however, 
 his crime of embezzlement and forgery, his 
 great sin against the criminal and moral 
 laws, did not constitute the ex-convict's 
 central crime. Ibsen is explicit upon this 
 point. "I feel," says Borkman, "like a 
 Napoleon who has been maimed in his first 
 battle." Just so : those sins might perhaps 
 have been forgiven him if not here, here- 
 after. But this is what Borkman has 
 done, and it is Ella Bentheim the woman 
 who should have been his wife who is 
 his accuser :
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 183 
 
 " You have killed the love-life in me. Do you 
 understand what that means ? The Bible speaks 
 of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgive- 
 ness. 1 I have never understood what it could be, 
 but now I understand. The great, unpardonable 
 sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.' 1 
 
 This is, in my judgment, the most power- 
 ful, as it is the most terrible and most 
 accusatory, bit of writing in the book. " To 
 murder th$ love-life in a human soul." As 
 coming from so great a master, we must 
 respect Ibsen's curious interpretation of 
 the "mysterious sin" of which the Bible 
 darkly whispers. Borkman murdered the 
 love-life in Ella Eentheim's soul when he 
 " sold her love for a directorship." He 
 seems to have weighed the two his love 
 for her and his love for power and gold 
 and the lust of might and power won over 
 love for the true woman. For Ella, we 
 are well assured, loved him so well that she 
 would have done and dared all for his sake, 
 
 1 The German censor expunged this passage.
 
 184 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 and would have " stood at his side when the 
 crash came." This scene is one of the most 
 memorable and painful to be found in the 
 whole range of dramatic authorship. They 
 are the accuser and the accused she the 
 true woman, dying by inches but faithful 
 unto death; he the still caged wolf, freed 
 from his prison-fetters but never to feel free 
 again. If his own case has been hard, 
 though so doubly deserved his punishment, 
 how does his suffering compare with hers ? 
 Some of his, perhaps much of it, has been 
 endured in a sub-conscious state, not 
 actively seeing the whole of his own 
 punishment ; but with her it is all so 
 different. She is the woman and in the 
 long run the woman pays. "You have 
 done to death," she says, " all the gladness 
 of life in me. From the day when your 
 image began to dwindle in my mind, I have 
 lived my life as though under an eclipse." 
 The affection of this unhappy woman for
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 185 
 
 Borkman's son Erhart, and her struggles 
 with his mother for possession of him, 
 is one of the finest, most distinctive, 
 and most pathetic touches in the play. 
 But, like most of Ibsen's young men, 
 Erhart is on fire with the determina- 
 tion to "live his life." His unhappy 
 father suddenly conceives the illusionary 
 but perfectly characteristic idea of hand- 
 ing down to Erhart the duty of " re- 
 habilitating " (this is the difficult word 
 opreisning, which caused Mr. Archer such 
 dire vexation of soul in translating) the 
 fallen fortunes of the house of Borkman. 
 But Erhart is at this moment again like 
 others of Ibsen's young men engaged in 
 an amorous intrigue with a Mrs. Wilton, 
 who on this occasion makes the inevitable 
 Ibsenite "third." The son is, indeed, 
 at the moment of the father's cry for the 
 " rehabilitation " of his house, upon the 
 point of eloping with Mrs. Wilton, who
 
 1 86 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 is a divorcee, and hence he (Erhart) is 
 very much disinclined to take any part in 
 his felon-father's chimerical plans. And 
 so it is that the shaken, spent, already 
 dying Borkman fares forth into the snow, 
 more than half-delirious though he is, to 
 find his " unborn millions" of treasure 
 and to gloat over them. The two women, 
 fearful of harm coming to him at such a 
 time of year and in such a place, follow 
 him the wife who has loved him in her 
 own way, and the woman whose fate it 
 is to love him for ever and always 
 until death and after. Here in the snow 
 they find him. . . . He is babbling, in- 
 consistently, feebly, fiercely, of the vast 
 wealth for which he will dig and delve. 
 Apostrophizing the " prisoned millions " 
 that he has made his god to his own un- 
 doing, he cries 
 
 "I love you, as you lie there spell-bound in 
 the deeps and the darkness. I love you, unborn
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 187 
 
 treasures yearning for the light. I love you, with 
 all your shining train of power and glory. I love 
 you, love you, love you ! " 
 
 The end is close at hand now, and that 
 end is death in the snow-drifts. Like 
 another Brand, but of base clay, he falls 
 dead in the snow dying not, however, 
 in presence of the wife he has never 
 loved, but tended by the woman who has 
 loved him so surpassingly. Like Brand, 
 he falls in the snow, but not under the 
 avalanche of Will. If Brand be meet 
 type of the Archangel, Borkman might 
 almost as suitably sit for the portrait of 
 the Arch-fiend. How typical is each ! 
 
 The wife of Borkman is an interesting 
 study of a not unusual type. We feel 
 contempt for her when she so manifestly 
 dreads the least word of the skeleton 
 in the Borkman cupboard being breathed 
 abroad as if she did not know that the 
 old story can never be forgotten, and that
 
 1 88 Ibsen on his Merits. 
 
 their name is branded in sight of the world 
 for evermore. Afterwards her distress, 
 and the genuine human nature that Ibsen 
 weaves into her character, are profoundly 
 moving, and the comparison of these two 
 women each so "strong" or so "weak" 
 in knowledge of the other's feelings towards 
 the criminal is another of the most 
 poignant features of this intensely moving, 
 if morbid, play. How immeasurably fine, 
 too, is the final five minutes, embracing 
 the death in the snow and the spectacle 
 of these two women, who have hated each 
 other so intensely, clasping hands over 
 the guilty corpse ! In this we perceive, 
 and perceive with the most pleasurable 
 emotions, that the same influences which 
 prompted the peaceful end of Little Eyolf 
 are still at work in the poet-soul of the 
 Norwegian master. A greater peace has 
 somehow descended upon him since he 
 gave to us The Master- Builder, and out of
 
 Ibsen on his Merits. 189 
 
 storm has grown a sorrowing but less rest- 
 less song. 
 
 John Gabriel Borkman, " couldn't live 
 in the fresh air," as one of the characters 
 in the play is made to express it. This, 
 with the added explanation that he "was 
 a miner's son," may be interpreted as sym- 
 bolism. Such men as he cannot " live in 
 fresh air." And by the time such men 
 as he cease to exist upon this beautiful 
 earth, we shall no longer have need of an 
 Ibsen to exploit their virtues that are 
 not. 
 
 P. C. S. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 LONDON AND IJECCLES.
 
 A 000 675 860