Iconoclasts. James Huneker
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history know how the Saxons wiped out Christianity from the Roman provinces they conquered, except in a petty mountainous district in Wales, and how a second wave of invaders ruined the Celtic church of Ireland and the Celtic church of Iona, and founded an empire in Russia. It seemed indeed as if the men who went to death hoping to drink mead in Valhalla, would drive back those who went to battle hoping to sing hymns among the cherubim. It is with this period of the world's history that Ibsen's juvenile play is occupied.
King Gandalf and his men sail to Sicily to avenge the death of his father, who had fallen in a Viking raid. There the rough wielder of the sword meets the Christian maiden Blanca, and is conquered by her. The word "forgiveness" overcomes him. He has sworn to die or be revenged, so now resolves to die. Then he recognizes in a Christian hermit the father whom he had believed to be dead. He buries only his sword and his Viking spirit in the tomb of warriors.
The language of the piece is decidedly juvenile, and the whole of no dramatic importance, yet it exhibits traces of the dramatic Viking of to-day. In an address delivered at the Press Society's meeting, Dr. Julius Elias points out that it contains another Ibsen motive, "the ethical mission of woman." In the Lady of Ostraat, Ibsen's character, Nils Lykke, says, "A woman is the most powerful thing on earth; in her hands it lies to lead the man where God would have him," and here Gandalf referring to an old saga says:—
'Tis said that to Valfather's share belongs
Only one-half of the slain warrior;
The other half falls into Freia's lot.
This saying I could never understand,
But now I grasp it. A slain warrior
Am I myself—and the best half of me
Belongs to Freia.
And Blanca leads Gandalf where God would have him; by her the rude sea-king has his moral feelings touched, the heathen becomes a Christian, the sea-rover a spiritual champion. She tells him that the Northland that set out over the ocean to conquer the world with fire and sword is called to "deeds of the spirit on the sea of thought."
Dr. Wicksteed in his invaluable lectures on Henrik Ibsen gives his readers some specimen translations in prose of the poem. They deal, in the main, with those themes dear to Tolstoy and Zola—The Miner, Afraid of the Light, The Torpedo and the Ark, Burnt Ships, The Eider Duck—in this famous lyric as bitter-sweet as Heine's, Ibsen prefigured his own flight from his native land to the South. We are told by some that Ibsen was a man aloof from his country, a hater of its institutions. No man, not even Björnson, has been more patriotic. He has loved his Norway so well that he has seen her faults and has not hesitated to lay on the lash. He loves the people quite as much as Tolstoy his peasants; but he would have them stand each man on his feet. Like Brand he has essayed to lead them to the heights, and never has gone down to their level.
Love's Comedy (1862) is of especial interest to the student of the prose plays. In it are floating, amorphous perhaps, the motives we know so well of the later Ibsen. The comedy is accessible to English readers, for it has been translated by C. H. Herford, with an introduction and notes. Falk and Svanhild part because they fear themselves—she to marry a rich merchant, he to go his poetic path and attempt to fly against the wind. The cruel satire of the lines stirred all Norway. The paradox of two young folk abandoning each other just because they fear their love will end the way of most married love, is at least a rare one. As much as we admire Svanhild's resolution to remember her love as a beautiful ideal, unshattered by material realization, we cannot help suspecting that sensible old Gulstad's money bags have a charm for her practical bourgeois nature. It is Ibsen and his problem that is more interesting; we see the parent idea of a long line of children, that idea which may be embodied in one phrase—never surrender your personality. "Nothing abides but the lost" might be a motto for the piece, as Dr. Herford says. Brandes and Wicksteed argue most interestingly from the theme. The young Ibsen had recognized the essential mockery of so-called romantic love, with its silly idealizations, its perplexed awakenings, its future filled with desperate unhappiness. He had the courage to say these things by way of a satirical parable, and there arose upon the air a burden of disgust and hatred: cynic, atheist, brutal, and shocking. Ibsen bore it as he bore his life long the attacks of press and public—in silence. He could wait, and wait he did.
When Lugné-Poë produced The Comedy of Love at his Théâtre de l'Œuvre, the translation by Mlle. Colleville and F. de Zepelin, Catulle Mendès, who had been quarrelling with M. Poë to the extent of a duel, wrote the following criticism of Ibsen's early work. It illustrates the real Gallic point of view in the Ibsen controversy:—
It seems that sensitive admirers of Henrik Ibsen do not class The Comedy of Love among the masterpieces of the great Norwegian. I am glad of it for the sake of those masterpieces. The thing which is displeasing above everything in this piece, where Ibsen's genius once more halts, is that one is unable to get at the initial intention of the author. What does he pretend to teach by making to evolute and chatter in the garden of a country house—what house I do not know, but for certain it is a matrimonial one—a number of engaged couples, married folks and parsons who are the fathers of a dozen children each? Those who used to love love no more; those who were romantic have become bourgeois; those who are still romantic will become bourgeois. Then there is a poet, whose lyrics we should classify in France—but we are in Lugné-Poë's house I—as provincial, who treats like a Philistine all these poor engaged persons, these engaged lovers, of our everyday life. As for him, being a poet (Heavens I how mediocre his verses must be!)—he pursues the vague, the immaterial, the sublime. He would like very well to carry with him in this pursuit a young person, once upon a time "poetical," but all the same strongly "practical," who, after inclining for an instant toward a life of devotion and dévouement with the poet, does not hesitate to espouse a very rich merchant, who evidently has read Emile Augier, badly translated.
It is with difficulty I discover the object of Henrik Ibsen. This puzzle is, however, very excusable in a French critic, since it is shared by critics of the North. Madame Ahlberg (read Ernest Tissot's book) thinks that Ibsen desires to show the contrast between love and the caricature of it which we see in marriage. Georg Brandes, the celebrated Danish critic, in The Comedy of Love esteems it impossible to know where he would carry the poet, and says, "the only certain thing is his pessimistic, conception of love and marriage."
But Henry Jaeger, Norwegian critic, is not even sure of this, and to his mind this piece indicates that there are "sentiments of love, like those of religion; that is to say, which lose in sincerity the moment they are expressed." On which side should a Frenchman have an opinion on points which so divide much nearer judges? At the bottom I am not far from believing that Ibsen premeditated making it understood that even in love all is vanity upon this earth. Ecclesiastes was of this advice, and banality, that gray sun, shines on all the world. Is this to say that The Comedy of Love is a mediocre work? Not at all. Denuded of all dramatic interest, puerile because of its romantic philosophy, and often tedious to the point of inspiring us with the fear of a never ending yawn, this piece, all the same a dream of youth already virile, agitates in its incoherence, ideas, forces, revolts, ironies, and hopes, which a little later in more sure works, obscure but sure, will be the sad challenges of human personality. And moreover, in the lyrical language of personages too emphatically lyrical, which proceeds from that Suabianism which Heine vanquished, among all the little birds, all the little flowers, all the starlit nights, and other sillinesses of German romance, towers, flashes, and radiates resplendent the ardent soul of the true poet.
III
THE VIKINGS AT HELGELAND
(1858)
With Dr. P. H. Wicksteed's affirmation, "Ibsen is a poet," humming in my ears, I went to the most beautiful theatre in London, the Imperial, to hear, to see, above all to see, the Norwegian dramatist's Vikings, a few days before it was withdrawn, in May, 1903. For one thing the production was doomed at the start: it was wofully miscast. The most daring imagination cannot picture Ellen Terry as the fierce warrior wife of Gunnar Headman. Once a creature capriciously sweet, tender, arch, and delightfully arrogant, Miss Terry is now long past her prime. To play Hjördis was murdering Ibsen outright.
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