Iconoclasts. James Huneker
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will ever "parry the ethical claim"; and if, in Flaubert's eyes, "man is bad because he is stupid," in Ibsen's "he is stupid because he is bad." "To will is to have to will," says his Maximus in Emperor and Galilean. This phrase is the capstone of the Ibsen structure. If he abhors the inflated phraseology of altruism, he is one with Herbert Spencer, who spoke of a relapse into egotism as the only thing which could make altruism enduring.
Felicity, then, with Ibsen is experience itself, not the result of experience. Life is a huge misunderstanding, and the Ibsen dramas hinge on misunderstandings—the conflict between the instinctive and the acquired, between the forces of heredity and of environment. Herein lies his preference for the drama of disordered wills. And touching on this accusation of morbidity and sickness, may there not be gleaned from Shakespeare and Goethe many mad, half-mad, and brain-sick men and women? The English poet's plays are a perfect storehouse of examples for the alienist. Hallucination that hardens into mania is delicately recorded by Ibsen; he notes with a surgeon's skilled eye the first slight decadence and the final entombment of the will. Furthermore, the chiefest malady of our age is that of the will enfeebled by lack of exercise, by inanition due to unsound education; and as he fingers our spiritual muscles he cries aloud their flabbiness. In men the pathologic symptoms are more marked than in women; hence the number of women in his dramas who assume dominant rôles—not that Ibsen has any particular sympathy with the New Woman, but because he has seen that the modern woman marks time better with the Zeitgeist than her male complement.
Will, even though your will be disastrous in its outcome, but will, he insists; and yet demonstrates that only through self-surrender can come complete self-realization. To say "I am what I am," is the Ibsen credo; but this "I" must be tested in the fire of self-abnegation. To the average theologian all this rings suspiciously like the old-fashioned doctrine of salvation by good works. The Scotch leaven is strong in Ibsen. In his bones he is a moralist, in practice an artist. His power is that of the artist doubled by the profound moralist, the philosopher doubled by the dramatist; the crystallization in the plays of these antagonistic qualities constitutes the triumph of his genius.
III
The stage is Ibsen's pulpit, but he is first the artist; his moral, as in all great drama, is implicit. He is a doubter; he often answers a question with another question; and if he builds high he also digs deep. His plays may be broadly divided into three phases. First we get the national-romantic; second, the historical; third, the social dramas of revolt. In the first, under the influence of fable and folk-song, Ibsen delved into the roots of Scandinavia's past; then follow the stirring dramas, Fru Inger of Ostraat, The Vikings at Helgeland, The Pretenders, and those two widely contrasted epics, Brand and Peer Gynt. Beginning with The Young Men's League and ending with the dramatic epilogue, When We Dead Awake, the third period is covered. And what range, versatility, observation, poetic imagination, intellectual power! Yet this dramatist has been called provincial! Provincial—when his maiden tragedy, Catilina, begins B.C. and his epilogue ends the nineteenth century; when his characters are types as well as individuals that exist from South to North. True man of the North, he sought in Italy for his scene of action, his first hero. That his men and women are strongly Norwegian is no imputation of provincialism—Christiania is a world capital, Scandinavia is not a Bœotia. And is not human nature composed of the same soul-stuff the world over? A similar accusation might be easily brought against French, English, and German drama. Not for the sake of the phrase did M. Faguet salute Ibsen as "the greatest psychological dramatist since the time of Racine." And remember that Faguet is a Frenchman loyal to the art traditions of his race—logic, order, clarity of motive, and avoidance of cloudy dramatic symbolism.
There are at least three factors to be noted in the Ibsen plays—the play quâ play, that is, the drama for the sake of its surface intrigue, with its painting of manner and character; the more ulterior meanings and symbolism; and lastly, the ideologic factor, really the determining one. M. Jules Gaultier, a young French thinker, has evolved from the novels of Gustave Flaubert—greatest master of philosophic fiction—a metaphysic which is very engaging. Bovaryisme he denominates the tendency in humanity to appear other than it is. This trait has been dealt with by all world novelists and satirists; Bovaryisme has elevated it to the dignity of a Universal Fiction. We pretend to be that which we are not. It is the law of being, the one mode by which life is enabled to vary and escape the typic monotony of the species. It is the self-dupery of the race. We are all snobs of the Infinite, parvenus of the Eternal. We are doomed to dissemble, else perish as a race.
Now, apply the laws of biology to the moral world and you have the perfect flowering of the application in the Ibsen drama. The basic clash of character is that between species and individual. Each drama furnishes an illustration. In Rosmersholm we see Johann Rosmer—the last of the Rosmers, himself personifying the law of heredity—endeavouring to escape this iron law and perishing in the attempt. He drags down with him Rebekka West, who because of her tendency to variability, in an evolutionary sense, might have developed; but the Rosmer ideals poisoned her fresher nature. Halvard Solness, the Master Builder, suffers from his tyrannical conscience—nearly all of Ibsen's characters have a morbid conscience—and not even the spiritual lift of that exotic creature, Hilda Wangel, can save him from his fate. He attempts to go beyond the law and limits of his being, and his will fails. But is it not better to fall from his giddy height than remain a builder of happy homes and churches? From her birth neurotic Hedda Gabler is hopelessly flawed in her moral nature. She succumbs to the first pressure of adverse circumstance. She, too, is not ripe for spiritual re-birth. Nora Helmer, like Hilda Wangel, like Mrs. Alving, frees herself by her variation from what we, in our ignorance of our own possibilities, call the normal. It is a cardinal doctrine of Ibsen that we alone can free ourselves; help can never come from without. This he demonstrates by his ironical flaying of the busybody reformer and idealist, Greger Werle, in The Wild Duck. Ibsen also presents here the reverse of the Ibsen medal. Ekdal, the photographer, who is utterly worthless, a fantastic liar and masquerader, like Peer Gynt, is not saved by the interference of Werle—quite the contrary; tragedy is summoned through this same Werle's intrusion, and that most pathetic figure, Hedwig Ekdal, might have striven to self-realization had not her young existence been snuffed out by a virtuous lie. Hilda Wangel is the incarnation of the new order, Rosmersholm of the old. And, les femmes, ces êtres médiocres et magiques, as Jules Laforgue calls them, the women of Ibsen usually manage to evade the consequences of the life-lie better than the men. The secret is that, nearer nature, they instinctively will to live with more intensity of purpose. Sir Oliver Lodge thinks that the conflict between Free Will and Determinism is because we "ignore the fact that there must be a subjective partition in the universe separating the region of which we have some inkling of knowledge from the region of which we have none." It must be that reservoir of eternal certitudes for which Maurice Maeterlinck sighs. The unknown, the subliminal forces là-has, have their share in the control of our will, though we may only judge of what we see on this side of the "misty region" of metaphysic. Be this as it may, Ibsen is content to set his puppets acting within the appreciable limits of free will allowed us by our cognition.
If this evolutionary foundation of the Ibsen drama be too deep, there is also the dialogue, externally simple, terse, natural, forcible, and in the vernacular replete with sonority, colour, and rhythm. Yet it is a stumbling-block; beneath the dramatist's sentences are pools of uncertainty. This is the so-called "interior" or "secondary" dialogue. The plays, read in the illuminating sense of their symbolism, become other and more perplexing engines of power. They are spiritual palimpsests, through which may be dimly deciphered the hieroglyphics of another soul-continent. We peer into them like crystal-gazers and see the faint outlines of ourselves, but so seemingly distorted as to evoke a shudder. Or is our ill-suppressed horror in the presence of these haunting shapes of humanity the result of ignorance? The unknown is always disquieting. Hippolyte Taine may be right. "Our inborn human imperfection is part of the order of things, like the constant deformation of the petal in a plant." And perhaps to Ibsen, who is ever the dramatist, the lover of dramatic effects, should be granted the license of the character painter. To heighten the facts of life is a prime office of the playwright.
But he has widened by his synthesis the domain of the theatre; he has brought to it new material for assimilation; he, in a technical sense, has