Iconoclasts. James Huneker
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Oernulf is not present, but is represented by his youngest son, Thorolf. After the drinking has begun the trouble-breeding Hjördis weaves her spell of disaster. She sets boasting the warriors, forces the hapless Gunnar to describe how he slew the great white bear, and openly proclaims him a better man than Sigurd. Even this breach of hospitality does not embitter the friends. Thorolf, however, is hot, imprudent, and at a chance word from Hjördis is set on fire. Miss Terry, it must be confessed, played this entire scene with great dexterity. Her broken phrases—for she has not a prolonged note in her compass—her scornful mien, her raucous voice, and shrewish gestures were admirable agents for the expression of ill-stifled hate. Taunted beyond his self-control, Thorolf tells the woman that Egil has been kidnapped by Oernulf and his other sons. Instantly she screams that Egil has been slain. Thorolf leaves, swearing that he will be avenged; that, "Ere eventide shall Gunnar and his wife be childless."
At this juncture Gunnar, who has hitherto seemed a lymphatic sort of person, seizes his battle-axe, and, despite Sigurd's word of warning, follows Thorolf and kills him. A moment later enter Oernulf, bearing in his arms the child Egil, happy and unharmed. It is a striking climax. To the father, already bereaved of his other sons, lost in the fight with the treacherous peasant, Kara, for the possession of the child, must be told the terrible news. Thorolf is the apple of his eye, the last of his race. Broken-hearted Gunnar explains. Outraged at the deed caused by Hjördis, the timid Dagny gives her the lie when Gunnar's feat is again nauseatingly dwelt upon. "It is Sigurd who won the woman; look at the ring on my arm!" Amazed, infuriated, Hjördis turns upon her husband. Is it true? Gunnar confesses without shame. Sigurd presses his hand and proclaims him a brave man, though he did not slay the bear. The hall empties and after Dagny-woman-like—triumphantly exults and cries, "Who is now the mightiest man at the board—my husband or thine?" Hjördis is left to her miserable thoughts. She soon makes up her mind, "Now have I but one thing left to do—but one deed to brood upon; Sigurd or I must die."
These words recall the fatal Siegfrieds-Tod! of Götterdämmerung. Both Wagner and Ibsen followed the main lines of the immortal epic.
If in this act the student, curious of those correspondences which subtly knit together ages widely asunder, discovers a modern tone, he will regain the larger air of the antique North in Act III. It belongs essentially to Hjördis. In the free daylight we discover her weaving a bowstring. Near her, on a table, lie a bow and some arrows. The one soliloquy of the piece begins the act. It is short, pregnant—what is to follow is incorporated in its nuances. She pulls at the bowstring. It is tough, well weighted. "Befooled, befooled by him, by Sigurd—" But ere many days have passed—!
Gunnar enters. He has had a bad night. He cannot sleep because of the murdered Thorolf. Then for a few bars of this barbaric music Ibsen relapses into pure Shakespeare. We see Lady Macbeth and her epileptic husband merge into the figures of the fiercer Brynhild and the weaker Gunther. The man is urged on to betray, to slay his friend.
Hjördis lies to Gunnar—as lied, when mad with jealousy, Brynhild to Gunther and Hagen; but this same Hjördis has hardly the excuse of her bigger-souled sister.
Gunnar weakens. He describes a dream that he has had of late. "Methought I had done the deed thou cravest; Sigurd lay slain on the earth; thou didst stand beside him and thy face was wondrous pale. Then said I, 'Art thou glad, now that I have done thy will?' But thou didst laugh and answer, 'Blither were I didst thou, Gunnar, lie there in Sigurd's stead.'" Ill at ease, Hjördis flouts this dream and pushes her cause to an issue. Sigurd must die. How? "Do the deed, Gunnar—and the heavy days will be past." She promises cheap joys—love. He leaves her clutched to the very heart by her baleful words. The next interview is with Dagny. No trouble now in winging this emotional bird. Already she repents of her cruelty the previous night and would make amends. Hjördis recognizes the malleability of the woman and pierces her armour by proving to her her own unfitness for the high position as wife of Sigurd—now the sole hero. She plays all the music there is hidden within this string, and it sounds its feeble, little, discouraged tune without further ado. Dagny feels her worthlessness, has always felt it; better let Sigurd go unattended, unhampered, and quite alone upon that shining path of glory which surely awaits him. She leaves. Treading upon her heels almost comes the redoubtable Sigurd to this exposed cavern of the wicked. Too soon he falls into the toils, not because, like Hercules with Omphale, he is merely a sensuous weakling, but because he has loved Hjördis from the first. The plot curdles. Explanations fall like leaves in the thick of autumn. If Sigurd has loved, Hjördis has anticipated him. This eagle bends curved beak and is of the lowly for the moment. She proves to Sigurd that the one unpardonable sin is the repudiation of love.
For another and a nobler motive Sigurd gives place to his beloved friend Gunnar, yet none the less is his a crime. It must be expiated, as was John Gabriel Borkman's. Curious it is to note the persistency through a half century of an idea. Like Flaubert, Ibsen did not really add to his early acquired stock of images and ideas.
Tempted almost beyond his powers, Sigurd manages to save his self-respect and remain faithful to his wife. He recognizes his mistake; he has always loved the other woman, though he never knew before that this affection was returned. Hjördis bids him renounce all for her; together they will win the throne of Harfager—the ultimate dream of Sigurd. Sadly he bends his back to her gibes, to her devilish suggestions. One way is open to him. He can fight Gunnar in behalf of Oernulf and thus avenge the death of Thorolf and put an end to an existence become insupportable. Hjördis has other plans.
Act IV is short. We see the unhappy Oernulf lamenting his murdered son before a black grave mound. He sings his Drapa over the dead body. A storm arises. It is a night of terrors. Kara, the peasant, still unappeased, burns the home of Gunnar. Hjördis meets Sigurd and, after entreating vainly, shoots him with the bow and arrow she has made expressly for the purpose. A strand of her hair is entwisted in the bowstring. Sigurd, dying, tells her to her horror that he is not a pagan, that even in death he will not meet her "over there," for he is a Christian man; the white God is his; King Ethelstan of England taught him to know the new religion. (The epoch of the play is A.D. 933.) Despairingly, the strong-souled woman casts herself into a chasm and is translated into Valhall by her immortal sisters, the Valkyrs. This last scene is hopelessly undramatic and, as given at the Imperial, quite meaningless. After Hjördis commits suicide the curtains shut out the scene.
In the play, however, Oernulf, Dagny, Gunnar, and Egil are discovered watching the storm. Gunnar claims the protection of the man whose son he has slain. The body of Sigurd is found, and the arrow of Hjördis. "So bitterly did she hate him," whispers Dagny to herself with true Ibsenesque irony. Gunnar says aside, "She has slain him—the night before the combat; then she loved me after all." These sly, pitiless strokes would have proved too much to a British audience, sufficiently outraged by several of Hjördis's very plain speeches. The little Egil sees his mother on a black horse "home-faring" with the Valkyrs. The storm passes; peacefully the moon casts its mild radiance upon this field of strange conflict.
IV
THE THREE EPICS
BRAND (1866), PEER GYNT (1867), EMPEROR AND GALILEAN (1873)
In his three epical works—for epics they are—Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen reached poetic heights that he has never since revisited. The spiritual fermentation attendant upon his first visit to Italy in May, 1864, gave Norway, indeed all Scandinavia, its first modern epic. And it is not strange that this Italian journey should produce such monumental results. Goethe was at heart never so German as in Italy; and Ibsen, one of the few names that will be coupled with the poet of Faust when the intellectual history of the past century is written, was never such a Northman as in Rome, though he had left his native land full of bitterness, a self-imposed exile, doomed to exist on the absurd stipend doled out to him with niggardly hands by the Norwegian government. Yet, instead of turning to antiquity, he penned Brand, one of the few great epics since Milton and Goethe, and then as a satiric pendant let loose the demoniac powers of his ironic fantasy in Peer Gynt. In this vast symphony, Brand is the first sombre movement, Peer Gynt a brilliant Mephistophelian scherzo, while Emperor and Galilean is the solemn and mystic last movement.
Brand places Ibsen among the great mystics