The Author in a Cul-de-sac
Henrik Ibsen
The artists and authors of our day have one peculiarity in common, which is that they, with one or two exceptions, have no idea of perspective either with regard to the future or the past. Their perspective in the past is shown by Ebers among the Pyramids, and Alma Tadema among the broken pots of Mycenæ. Their perspective in the future is an outlook into a cul-de-sac. The majority of authors in the latter half of this century have conducted their readers by a more or less roundabout path into a cul-de-sac, where they have left them; it has occurred so often that the reading public have begun to lose patience. This fondness for cul-de-sacs is clearly perceived in the drama of our time.
We will not concern ourselves with the lesser playwrights, for the utmost that they can do is to follow the example of their masters and parody them by their imitation. We will turn instead to one of the masters themselves, to one who is justly considered a great dramatist—Henrik Ibsen.
If we examine his entire life-work, piece by piece, we shall arrive at the conclusion that it was a persistent wandering out of one cul-de-sac into the other.
It began with Love’s Comedy: Marriage is synonymous with stupefaction, not to marry is synonymous with theorising; remains the missing x, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; result: cul-de-sac.
It is continued in Per Gynt: Romantic imagination is synonymous with self-deception; school of life is synonymous with apathy; the missing x is synonymous with the result: cul-de-sac.
In Brand the diagram is simpler: Excessive desire for moral perfection contra absolute religious indifference; result: cul-de-sac.
Whoever reads carefully these three great Speculative works of Ibsen’s will be astonished to find that it was by no means unconsciously that he ran into these cul-de-sacs; on the contrary, he steered straight for them, and the last sentences of Brand read like a triumphal epigram.
But by this time the floor of universal speculation had become too hot for him, and he trod it no more. He turned to a more comprehensible genre—if one may so call the popular discussions on social morals and society problems.
Here it seemed that the author and the thinker might wander arm in arm towards a clearly perceptible goal. How far he attained is a question which we will leave for the next chapter.
Above my table hangs an old engraving after the portrait of a woman by the younger Holbein in the gallery at Windsor. It is a face of the Hedda Gabler type—Hedda Gabler three hundred years ago. Fair as a lily, dressed after the newest fashion of her day with a half aureole on her head, puffed sleeves and a high collar, everything fashionably squeezed and tight-laced, and added to this an inscrutable face with cold, veiled eyes, and a small mouth which promises nothing good. She is undoubtedly a well-bred lady of good family, who is not likely to relax her features or change her deportment, but who might possibly allow others to make advances to her. She looks so conscious of her innocence and so demurely attractive, that one thinks that she also may have had an Eckert Lövborg to initiate her theoretically into the lives of young men.
Hedda Gabler is a lady who belongs to the higher middle class, and so carefully has Ibsen analysed her that every one devoted to the study of natural phenomena and class-distinction may, with the help of some preliminary knowledge, study and probe her nature down to the secret structure of her soul. As one well versed in life and anxious to divert attention from the track which he was pursuing, Ibsen declared that this time it was only a psychological study, with no criticism of society and no wrathful pessimism. And so, dear society, good and bad, you may set yourself at rest!
But society was not at rest. This Hedda Gabler was a creature who displeased it. Nearly all women objected to her and declined to entertain such a moral monster at their tea-table, while all women-worshippers felt that through her the whole sex had been wronged, and finally the majority of men were opposed to her because they were not able to discover any traces of either manly or womanly psychology.
This was not only the case in Germany, and in England which is the home of emancipated women and the birthplace of moral zeal, but even in the author’s own Scandinavia they fought shy of her. The priests listened—they who guarded the sacred fire on the altars of the great mystery. “What is this?” they asked. “Is he beginning to speak with tongues?” And the chaste priestesses of the pure Ibsen cult maintained an ominous silence. Everywhere stillness ensued—the stillness of the storm when it rains hailstones.
Another author would have been made to suffer for it; but the great name of the great moralist held hands and tongues at bay.
Amongst us it was murmured that the wise augur had not been quite as happy on this occasion. The strings of the dramatic puppet-show were a little more visible than usual, and the two pistol shots fired in the midst of a phlegmatic bourgeois milieu put an end to all illusion. Then the different degrees of beauty in the death-scenes! Life with or without vine-leaves in the hair!—Where, in the name of wonder, do people speak like that, and where in the upper or lower world do they feel like it?
You, most honoured master, you should carry away the scaffolding and lay aside your tools as soon as the house is finished.
Yet the story is not easily disposed of! There is something hidden away which is not expressed in words, though it sometimes beats and palpitates like an injured nerve, and if anyone were to succeed in touching it, he would hold the secret in his hand. But with Ibsen we never know whether or not we are really touching the central nerve, perhaps because the nerve is not a true vibration of the soul with which the author’s entire ego is in sympathy, but only a thought palpitating in the brain which owes its origin to other causes.
The point in Hedda Gabler on which the whole piece turns is mainly this: the dissection of an ideal.
In Nora, Ibsen gives us the ideal of the modern woman; in Hedda Gabler he dissects it. All that lies between is the slow, laborious work of digging. The miner[1] climbs down into the depths where he digs and hammers in the dark. No daylight reaches him there, he does not know what he is looking for, and he does not know what he finds. Are they diamonds or coals? In the darkness of the pit the “oppressed woman” meets him, he takes hold of her and believes that he has raised a treasure and discovered the diamond. But when he begins to cut it, he thinks that it is only rock-crystal, and when he examines it more carefully, he sees that he is holding in his hand a piece of coal.
Nora is the rough diamond, The Lady from the Sea is the rock-crystal, Hedda Gabler is a piece of coal, and a bad kind of coal too.
How did Henrik Ibsen, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” as an equally celebrated fellow-countryman called him, become a misogynist à la Strindberg?
“Man created woman—out of what?” says Nietzsche. “Out of a rib of his god, the Ideal.”
It seems to me that this one little sentence contains the concentrated essence of everything that has ever been said, thought, felt and sung by man about woman.
All his vanities and all his wants, from the tenderest melodies of his soul to the most brutal demands of his senses, all his capabilities and his incapabilities, his entire cleverness and his entire stupidity, all these man has immortalised in his songs on woman.
Woman was silent. Or if she made herself heard there was not much sense in what she said. In olden times there occasionally arose a chirping sound like that of a little bird; in later times—in the times of the celebrated writers, George Sand, George Eliot, Fru Edgren-Leffler, etc.—they moralised on the subject of man. But as the sex of modern authoresses shows a certain natural disposition to attire itself in knickerbockers, one really cannot place them under the heading of “women,” they seem rather to belong to a state of transition.
The woman who is completely a woman has never betrayed herself, has never told tales out of school; and why? Because she was not so stupid. She loved and made herself loved to the best of her ability, she hated and teased, and that was an art she understood right well; while the happy or unhappy object of her attentions wrote and sang poems about her, rejoiced and suffered, wrote and sang poems....
Everything that man has written about woman is merely the description of woman such as he imagines her, it is the expression of what man expects of her, seeks for in her, asks of her, and finds or does not find in her. It is a reflection of the varying play of man’s soul throughout all ages.
Every man, every nation, every age has created its own particular type of woman.
The superficial and excitable temperament of the French during the century has produced variations of the type of contriving, vivacious little coquettes; the two great German authors, Goethe and Keller, created the thoughtless, sensuous child of nature; John Bull has so conscientiously simplified himself since the Renaissance that he is no longer able to create any type of human womanhood, his women are elves and Medusas; and as for the women in the new Scandinavian literature, with the exception of Strindberg’s hyenas and Ibsen’s “thinking women,” they can hardly be said to occupy a very prominent position.
Strindberg’s fates are ghastly vampires who suck the blood of horror-stricken man. They are not to be described in words, it would require the art of a great painter to represent them as they appear in all the unreal reality of their being.—There still remains Ibsen’s woman.
Ibsen’s woman holds her sway throughout Europe, and that is in itself a sufficient reason for us to study her as she is represented in his works, and as she stands before us in real life.
“Hedda Gabler,” Ellida (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca (Rosmersholm), Gina, Hedvig (The Wild Duck), Fru Alving (Ghosts), Nora (The Doll’s House), Petra (An Enemy of the People), Selma (The League of Youth), Lona (The Pillars of Society), Solveig (Per Gynt), Agnes (Brand), Swanhild (Love’s Comedy)—here are the women whom Ibsen has created, since he became Ibsen, the seeker, the analyser, the doubter.
Their first and universal characteristic is that they are all misunderstood.
Their second and equally universal characteristic is that they are either unmarried or else unhappily married, the result in either case being discontent; ergo we have the thinking woman, the reading woman, the self-cultured woman, or in other words, the bourgeoisie with plenty of spare time on her hands.
Ibsen’s earliest period belongs to the traditional historical drama, which owed its origin to Germany; the romantic, lyrical and dramatic poems, Brand and Per Gynt, thrust themselves between with their contingent of angel-women who acted as deliverers of men; and all his other productions as an author were the result of his criticisms of society, or more correctly, his criticisms of the middle class. He was the bourgeois who rebelled against his surroundings, who raised the scorpion scourge against the flesh of his people and the ideals of his world. In his writings the middle class saw themselves reflected as in a looking-glass.
Each one of his writings contains the dissection of a bourgeois ideal, and it is always through a woman of the bourgeois class that the result is seen.
The first piece in which he condemned society was that bitterest of all parodies that has ever been written on legitimate unions: Love’s Comedy. Never has the institution of marriage been made to appear more ridiculous, or the basis of bourgeois society, i.e. its respectability, been more unmercifully dissected. At the same time the Ibsen keynote of man’s relation to woman, or what is virtually the same thing, woman’s relation to man, is already struck, and struck with no uncertain sound. A woman cannot live with a man, with any man; Swanhild loves Falk, but she will not yield herself to him either for to-day or for ever, for fear lest their love should not endure. She marries an old prig instead, and Falk goes away deeply moved and sings a song on eternal youth.
This bourgeois piece is framed on the negation of life itself, and its subject is the unnatural one of a solitary being who desires to stand alone. It is a profound, psycho-physiological moment when sickness has declared itself. Who is to blame? Bourgeois society? The author? Or both?
The Pillars of Society is the glorification of the woman who is able to stand alone—the old maid. There are two old maids in the piece, the one active, the other passive, and both are perfect providences on earth. It was really very pretty of Ibsen to have raised these much-neglected beings to the throne of honour. The principal old maid, Lona, who is an extraordinary specimen of emancipated womanhood, refuses to marry because she has had an unfortunate experience, and she dares not risk her happiness in that most terrible—also most glorious—of all games of chance, but prefers to stand on the shore and play providence. Selma (The League of Youth), Petra (An Enemy of the People), Gina, Hedvig (The Wild Duck), are four genuine examples of the bourgeois class. Selma—an ornamental little doll, a perfect Nora in the bud—is the poetry of a rich merchant’s home, poetry, that is to say, in the sense that the rich merchant understands it; she refuses to be poetry any longer and acquaints her husband with the fact that love and marriage must terminate because he has not “allowed her to take part” in his business troubles. Petra is the wage-earning daughter in an impecunious bourgeois home, a poor neutral creature who has forgotten that she is a woman, and in whom men forget it too. Gina, in Ibsen’s deepest piece, is a young lady housekeeper who is allowed to sit at dessert with the boarder, and the anæmic, hysterical, romantic Hedvig is her child; both are genuine portraits and equally genuine negations of womanhood in the heart of woman’s being. Finally Nora and Fru Alving, the two great progenitors of the entire race of thinking and reading women. Nora is a double being, in whom the author’s observation and reflection grow up side by side like two divided stems; and Fru Alving is Ibsen himself in the disguise of a woman. These pieces one and all describe the liberation of the housewife, the conventional table-cloth on the bourgeois table, the obvious corruption of bourgeois marriages, noble women who would be ruined by their contact with bad men, if it were not that they are the strong women who shake off the weak men, but who, in consequence of their unnatural behaviour, are changed into neutral beings in their flight before marriage, just as Daphne, in olden time, was changed into a laurel when on her flight before the god.
Hitherto Ibsen’s writings have had two sides which are directly opposed to one another: the one negative, pessimistic, direct, which served as so many leaves in the school-book of the bourgeoisie as the class of society which is the ruling class, but which is, by reason of its moral bankruptcy, doomed to immediate destruction. The scene of action is always an imaginary one, with a cosmopolitan colouring; it is not Ibsen’s fault if, on the Continent, his characters are looked upon as essentially Norwegian, he tried, to the best of his limited power, to render them cosmopolitan. The other side of his writings is quite positive, quite creditable as regards its starting-point and its aim: the glorification of woman as a vessel of good, as a saviour of society, as the conscience of man.
Then came The Wild Duck, which contained the most characteristic personalities upon the most ricketty foundation. One wondered what the old man was about.—Gregers Werle, who runs with moral precepts into the dwellings of day-labourers; and the lies of life, which also have their moral significance—it was Ibsen himself who held judgment upon Ibsen. And like a visage, reflected and distorted in muddy water, the figures of Gina and Hedvig glide past like so many poor, tormented, guilty or guiltless people with no ideals, no moral trumpets.
A couple of years later Rosmersholm appeared. It startled the whole circle of flattering women and their flatterers. No more censuring of society, no more glorification of woman! The bourgeois centre no longer takes the first place, it fades into a decorative background; the entire space is absolutely filled by two people, a man and a woman, who are engaged in a battle against one another. The man is a noble creature, weak but refined; the woman is a plebeian by birth and soul, coarse-grained and selfish, one whom nature has designed for a criminal. Here we also have a weak man and a strong woman, but the lights and shadows fall quite differently.
There is one thing which the author throws into the balance in the woman’s favour, and that is that the woman is brave and fit for life, while the man is cowardly and unfitted for it.
The next to appear was The Lady from the Sea.
People were astonished and asked what it was.
“It is a piece in praise of true marriage,” replied Ibsen’s women admirers, and they wept.
What of this hysterical Fru Ellida who waits expectantly for some one else, who lives on Platonic terms with her husband and ends by sending her—very grown-up—stepdaughter into an educational establishment? What does Fru Ellida do? She indulges in bold fancies and exalted dreams, and when the subject of her dreams stands before her, and when the great happiness comes, which is always equally the great danger—she does not recognise him, she is afraid of him, and she takes refuge with her safe and trustworthy spouse, the patient Wangel.
Can’t we see Ibsen’s eyes twinkling behind his spectacles?
One of the first principles, on which Ibsen’s glorification of woman rests, is that woman is noble.
Nora is noble, but Rebecca is not.
Another of his principles is that woman is courageous and well fitted for life.
Rebecca is courageous, but Ellida is cowardly.
... Let us turn to Hedda Gabler. She is what used, in older days, to be called a “dragon.” All that she says and does, all her smiles and her kisses are wicked, she is tormented by a love of mischief, she is filled with an impotent, cowardly greed which incessantly turns to an envious hatred of all things living, extending even to her own offspring.
But she is something more, she is a symbol.
Ibsen has resumed the thread which he allowed to drop since the appearance of The Wild Duck. Hedda Gabler is a daughter of the upper middle class, the class whose moral bankruptcy has afforded a subject for his social dramas. Hedda Gabler has the courage and the soul of the bankrupt daughter of a race of bankrupts, whose only rule of life is a hollow form, and she, in the guise of a woman, represents the unfruitfulness of this exhausted class.
But Hedda Gabler is something more. She is the reverse of Fru Alving. Fru Alving is a good woman destined to be ruined by men, Hedda Gabler is a bad woman by whom men are ruined.
There is yet another point about her. She is the destruction of the “ideal” in woman, the ideal which Ibsen incarnated in woman as the absolutely good, strong, clever, pure, courageous, etc.; in her he repudiates the worship of woman; in her he repudiates the vanguard of women who were armed by himself, the women’s rights women and opponents of men; all the deformities of the modern woman are concentrated in Hedda, who hates and rejects her own offspring.
This accounts for the mysterious silence which pervaded the north when the great prophet, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” began to speak with tongues.
If we glance over the work of Ibsen’s life-time, we see that every single ideal of the day which he dealt with in his writings was by him destroyed. First came that absolute faith which was the fundamental Christian ideal in Brand: he destroyed it. Then came the romantic capriciousness of a bourgeois soul in Per Gynt: he destroyed that also. In his social dramas he dealt with the conventions of society, and them he also destroyed. Afterwards came woman....
Ibsen is not an erotic, and his instinct taught him very little about woman. As woman she has no attractions for him, she is nothing more to him than an idea—a figure in a game of chess. He began to push these figures backwards and forwards. His first women were ghostly dialecticians. He did not know woman sufficiently well to write of her according to his own perceptions, so he modelled her according to recognised literary forms, i.e. after the writings of former generations. This was the origin of the glorification of a mother’s love (Agnes) in Brand, and the glorification of waiting (Solveig) in Per Gynt, both of which are creations of undoubted poetical beauty, for Ibsen was a great poet in his youth.
His social dramas were the result of discontent, and he sought for and found the discontented woman. His method of creation is worthy of notice. His men differ, but with his women the course of development is always clearly discernible. In The League of Youth, which is one of his earliest pieces, Selma already contains Nora in the bud, while Petra in one of his other dramas resembles a photograph of Lona; Dr Rank afterwards turns into Oswald; Fru Alving has the temperament which develops into Rebecca and stands in doubt before the possibility of murder, Rebecca commits it, and both without moral compunction. Yet in spite of this, the glorification of woman reached its zenith in Fru Alving, and as formerly its tendency was to increase, so now it began to decrease. Rebecca is followed by the Lady from the Sea, and she in turn by Hedda—lower, ever lower. There is always one special peculiarity, as I have just signified, which Ibsen carries on from one character to the other, and which he either increases or destroys. For instance, Rebecca longs for life and is courageous, while Ellida thirsts for life but is not courageous, and Hedda is not courageous nor does she thirst for life, but is cowardly and inquisitive. In each piece he leaves a little bit of ideality to be dissected in his next work, and the last remnant of the ideal bequeathed by Hedda is “a beautiful death.” The Master Builder’s death is no longer beautiful.
Thus Ibsen’s constructive method is revealed.
Men always write about woman as they imagine her to be and as they desire her, and it is the same when a woman writes, she always pictures herself as man sees her. It is woman’s nature to mould herself after a form, and to desire a form in which she can mould herself. But of course this manner of speaking, thinking, acting always is and remains only a superficial form. There is something beneath it which follows other laws and is seldom revealed to the gaze of man. This is perhaps the reason why Ibsen, though he did not draw his women from nature, was destined in a few years’ time to meet his Lonas, Noras, and Rebeccas in real life. The Lonas founded high schools for the advanced education of women, became students themselves and educated others, the Noras became authoresses and produced a redundant literature dealing with morals, and the Rebeccas claimed the right of an unmarried woman of thirty to take possession of the man whom they considered worthy of being made happy.
When Ibsen reappeared on the scenes with his Master Builder, after an interval during which he had become celebrated, the physiognomy which he presented was one that was quite unexpected. He seems to be in the same predicament as “the old fellow who did not know how to help himself.” Everything goes round in a circle, as it did in Solness’s head before he fell from the tower. And if it is possible to find any meaning at all in this very obscure piece, it is that Ibsen had a presentiment that he was going to fall down off the height of his dialectic scaffolding, but that he was not able to give up his useless habit of climbing, which, for such an old man, was a very break-neck amusement.
This presentiment has been fulfilled, for in Little Eyolf he really did fall down and break his leg. And this leg-breaking is quite in keeping with the rest of Ibsen’s dramas. It is as naturalistic as it is symbolic, and its foundation is logical.
If we to-day glance back at Ibsen’s works, we can borrow the result of his quiet meditation and say: Henrik Ibsen is himself the little Eyolf of the middle class, begotten by the union of the Gallic formula of the rights of humanity with the Teutonic deterioration of race; compare Rita and Almers. And as soon as the parents had accomplished this, they attempted no more; again compare Rita and Almers. Their only achievement was a brain that developed itself in a logical manner.
From the beginning to the end of Ibsen’s work the one thing lacking is synthesis. Synthesis is one with personality, and Ibsen is not a personality; he is all brain. He has not, in any one of his books, the warmth and pulsation that belong to a complete nature; one feels something resembling warmth, yes, something very like fever-heat, in the passages where he describes cruelty; we need only recall the martyrdom of Agnes in Brand. He was a man of brains who composed; but the brain cannot compose. The blood composes, the soul composes, the nerves compose, but of all these he had very little—there was indeed a despairing lack of them in the year 1848 and thereabout. What did that period bring with it? A wordy warfare in which the logic of Judaism assumed the highest tone. Wherever this logic found its way, it imported debates upon problems, and Ibsen became the greatest of its pupils. He agitated, he “revolutionised,” he occasioned more than one act of momentary liberation. There was one characteristic which he retained from the days when he had been an apothecary’s apprentice, and that was an affection for acids. His entire authorship comes under the head of acids. He was never a psychologist, only a constructive agent, and since Rosmersholm even his constructive power has forsaken him; his men, Wangel, Tesmann, Solness, Almers are only variations of the same Rosmer. His women, Hedda, Hilda, Rita, are obvious derivations from the woman à la Strindberg. And now that he is nearing his end, he stands where his own Rita stands, whose last hope it is to make little civilised Eyolf-cripples out of the ragged, unmannerly, yet vigorous fisher class.
[1] See Ibsen’s Poems.