Iconoclasts. James Huneker
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hopelessly undramatic ideas to the boards, and by his indomitable tenacity has transmuted them into viable dramatic events and characters. Every piece of Ibsen can be played; even Peer Gynt and its forty scenic changes. It has been played—with its epic fantasy, humour, irony, tenderness, and philosophy; Peer Gynt, the very picture of the modern inconstant man, his spiritual fount arid, his imagination riotous, his conscience nil, rank his ideals, his dodging along the line of least moral resistance, his compromising with every reality of life—this Peer Gynt is the very symbol of our shallow, callous, and material civilization.
In all the conflicting undertow of his temperament and intellect, Ibsen has maintained his equilibrium. He is his own Brand, a heaven-stormer; his own Skule, the kingly self-mis-truster, and his own Solness, the doubter of himself cowed by the thoughts of the new generation—personified in August Strindberg and Gerhart Hauptmann. The old and the new meet at a tumultuous apex of art at once grim, repellent, morose, emotional, unsocial, masterful, and gripping. And what an art! What an ant-hill of struggling, impotent humanity he has exposed! What riches for the comedians—those ever admirable exponents of Bovaryisme! They pass us slowly by, this array of Ibsen men and women, with anguish in their eyes, their features convulsed and tortured into revealing their most secret shames by their cruel master. They pass us slowly, this motley mob, with hypnotic beckoning gestures and piteous pleading glances, for their souls will be presently spilled by their implacable creator. Lady Inger, her son dead, her daughter distraught; revengeful Hjördis and bewitched Sigurd; Duke Skule, fearing Hakon's divine right to the throne; Svanhilda freeing Falk as she goes to her martyr marriage with the unloved Gulsted; Brand, a new Adam, sacrificing wife and child to his fetich, "All or Nothing"; fascinating, inconstant Peer Gynt; Emperor Julian, that magnificent failure; the grotesque Steensgard; the whited sepulchre, Consul Bernick; Nora and her self-satisfied Helmer; Oswald Alving and his agonized mother; the doughty Stockmann, who declares that the exceptional man stands ever alone; Gina, the homely sensible, and Ekdal, the self-illusionist; Rebekka West and Johann Rosmer; Ellida Wangeland the Stranger; Hedda and Lövborg; Hilda and Solness; Asta and Rita Allmers; John Gabriel Borkman, his gloomy brows furrowed by thoughts of vengeance, accused by Ella Rentheim, whose soul he has let slip from his keeping; Rubek and Irene, the tragedy of the artist who sacrifices love for art; and the entire cohort of subsidiary characters, each one personal and alive—is not this small world, this pictured life, a most eloquent witness to the fecundity of the northern Rembrandt! He proclaims that "The Kingdom of God is within you"; Tolstoy has preached the like. But between the depressing quietism of the Russian and the crescent individualism of the Norwegian there lies the gulf separating East and West. Tolstoy faces the past. Ibsen confronts the future.
II
YOUTHFUL PLAYS AND POEMS
Students of Ibsen are deeply indebted to Mr. William Archer, not alone for his translations—colourless though they often are—but also for his illuminative critical articles on the Norwegian master. A comparatively recent one describes Ibsen's apprenticeship and destroys the notion that he owed anything to George Sand. He learned much of his stagecraft from Eugène Scribe, who was the artistic parent of Sardou. But as Mr. Archer wrote in an English periodical:—
If the French are determined to claim some share in the making of Ibsen, they must shift their ground a little. He did not get his ideas from George Sand, but he got a good deal of his stagecraft from Eugène Scribe and the playwrights of his school. Ideas he could not possibly get from Scribe, for the best of all reasons; but he can be proved to have been familiar, at the outset of his career, with the works of that great inventor and manipulator of situations, from whom there can be little doubt that he acquired the rudiments of dramatic construction. He ultimately outgrew his teacher, even in technical skill, and his later plays, from Ghosts onward, show the influence of Scribe mainly in the careful avoidance of his methods. Nevertheless it was in the Scribe gymnasium, so to speak, that he trained himself for his subsequent feats as a technician.
It is significant of Ibsen's frame of mind in his extreme youth, that his first drama was called Catilina (1850) and devoted to the Roman champion of individual rights, the hater of tyrants. He studied, says his biographer Hans Jaeger, Sallust's Catiline and Cicero's Orations against Catiline; and Vasenius is quoted to the effect that the Catilina of Ibsen is "a true representation of the historic personage"—an opinion in which Jaeger does not coincide. Two women, Aurelia and Furia, who dispute for the possession of the hero, are the two women natures that may be found in nearly all of the dramas. It is not the purpose of this study to dwell long upon the plays not in the regular repertory. Chiefly for the historic retrospect are they mentioned; particularly in the case of Catilina, the first as it sounds the key in which the master works of the poet are generally sounded, the key of individuality, "the utmost clearness of vision and fulness of power," to employ Ibsen's own words.
Twenty-six poems appeared in a slim volume. They are boyish, one dating from the nineteenth year of the author. They are immature, as might be expected, though charged with pessimism, a youthful Byronism. "He went about Grimstad like an enigma secured with seven seals," said a lady who knew him then.
The Warriors' Tomb; Norma, or a Politician's Love—this latter a musical tragedy; St. John's Night, need not occupy our time, for the curious Jaeger and Georg Brandes tell all there is to be told. St. John's Night, though unpublished, was produced at the Bergen Theatre, January 2, 1853.
The writer confesses to deep admiration for Fru Inger of Ostraat (1857) and The Pretenders (1864), both translated by Mr. Archer. Dealing as they do with historical figures they must be of necessity interesting to Norwegians. Considered purely as stage plays they appeal, particularly Lady Inger, a Lady Macbeth in her power for evil. Nils Lykke, too, is firmly drawn and is fascinating in his ambitions and debaucheries. There is one big scene in which the pair meet, which does not soon leave the memory. We seem to see in The Pretenders "the Great King's thoughts" of Skule, the germ of Julian's character, so magnificently exposed in Emperor and Galilean. The Pretenders is full of barbaric colour and the shock of arms. Some episodes recall in atmosphere those wonderful scenes in Wagner's Götterdämmerung with their hoarse-throated and bloody-minded thanes.
I was lucky enough to be present at the revival of this epical composition at Berlin in the Neues Theatre, October, 1904. Previous to this the Meiningen organization had presented the piece in a worthy manner, and once at the Schiller Theatre there had been a few representations. I was amazed at the power and verisimilitude of Ibsen's characters up to the death scene—rather a theatrical one—of the wicked Bishop Nikolas. After that the action became, because of the weak interpretation of Duke Skule by Franz Wüllner, uninteresting. And then, too, the fatiguing lengths; nearly five hours were consumed in this noteworthy performance. Director Max Reinhardt was a subtly wicked ecclesiastic, Friedrich Kanzler the heroic King Hakon. Die Kronprätendenten, like Wagner's Ring, should be given in sections. At the Neues Theatre it was splendidly mounted, though it is doubtful if it ever will be a popular drama in Germany.
The Feast at Solhaug (1857) was a success when it was played at Bergen. Jaeger says that Olaf Lijekrans, his next but unprinted drama, is more romantic than its predecessor. St. John's Night is redolent of folk-song, and the lyric prevails in nearly all the earlier work; but prose dominates in the three historical dramas, the third being The Vikings at Helgeland, considered elsewhere.
When Henrik Ibsen celebrated his seventieth birthday, the Berlin Press Society, as an introduction to the celebration, had an Ibsen première, at which his early drama, The Warriors' Tomb, was recited. This piece exhibits him not as the psychological but as the romantic poet, in his twenty-second year. He wrote the work in 1850 while he was a poor student in Christiania. It was written immediately after Catilina, and was performed on the stage at Christiania on September 26 of the same year. When Ibsen became stage manager of tin Bergen Theatre a revised version of the play was given, January 2, 1854. A local newspaper printed it as a feuilleton, but every copy of that paper has vanished, and The Warriors' Tomb exists only in two prompter's copies, one in Christiania, the other in Bergen. The latter is the one which he regards as the authorized version.
The piece is in verse and has a good movement and swing in it. It may be called a dramatized ballad, and treats of the last great struggle between Heathendom