Chapter IV: Ibsenism (3)

RELLING. So you don’t find Ekdal’s marriage good enough as it is?

GREGERS. No doubt it’s as good a marriage as most others, worse luck. But a _true_ marriage it has never been.

HJALMAR. You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.

RELLING. All rubbish, my boy! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many ... true marriages have you seen in the course of your life?

GREGERS. Scarcely a single one.

RELLING. Nor I, either.

And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar’s words (p. 345): ‘Well, then, isn’t it exasperating to think that it’s not I, but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage?... Isn’t the marriage between your father and Mrs. Sœrby founded upon complete confidence, upon entire and unreserved candour on both sides? They hide nothing from each other. Their relation is based, if I may put it so’ (!) ‘on mutual confession and absolution.’ Hence no one has yet seen a ‘true marriage’; and when by chance this miracle does happen it is fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Sœrby--Mr. Werle, who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young girls and sent old friends to prison in his place--Mrs. Sœrby, who confides to her husband that she has had illicit relations with every imaginable sort of man. It is a tame imitation of the scene in _Raskolnikow_ by Dostojewski, where the assassin and the prostitute, after a contrite confession, unite their soiled and broken lives; except that in Ibsen the scene is stripped of its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and vulgar.

With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in ‘true marriage,’ their husband suddenly becomes ‘a strange man,’ and, without further ceremony, they abandon their home and their children, some, like Nora, ‘to return to their birthplace,’ where ‘it will be easier for me to get something to do of one sort or another’; others, like Ellida, without giving a thought to what will become of them; others, again, like Mrs. Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover and throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously parodied this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for he assigns the laughable _rôle_ of the tragic runaway to a man. ‘I must out into the snow and tempest,’ declaims Hjalmar (_The Wild Duck_, p. 166), ‘and seek from house to house a shelter for my old father and myself.’ And he really goes, but naturally only to return home the next day, crestfallen, but stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need be said against the idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave-taking, which has become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen spared us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar.

We have not yet done with Ibsen’s drivel on the subject of marriage. He seems to exact that no girl should marry before she is fully matured, and possesses an experience of life and a knowledge of the world and of men (_A Dolls House_, p. 111):

NORA. And I--how have I been prepared to educate the children?... For that task I am not ready.... I must first try to educate myself.... I cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what is in books.

HELMER. You don’t understand the society in which you live.

NORA. No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it.

This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going in quest of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the largest possible number of persons, to make a trial, if possible, of a few men before binding herself definitely. A young girl is thoroughly prepared for marriage when she has attained to a respectable age, managed a few households, perhaps also given birth to sundry children, and in this way proved to herself and others that she understands the duties of a housewife and a mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it is the only reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he is here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and rejected as unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental marriage for a longer or shorter period, the preference for brides endowed with a rich experience in love-affairs and sundry children, all this has already existed. Ibsen may learn all that he needs on this subject from his half-compatriot, Professor Westermarck.[341] But he would be no degenerate if he did not regard as progress the return to conditions of the most primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not mistake the far-away past for the future.

Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his dramas. There should be no marriage from interest (Hedda, Mrs. Alving, Bernick, etc.). There should be no marriage from love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage of prudence is not a true marriage. But to marry because each pleases the other is equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida). The man should be the woman’s instructor and educator (Wangel, Bernick). The wife should not allow herself to be instructed and educated by the husband, but acquire the necessary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the wife discovers that her marriage is not a ‘true marriage,’ she leaves the husband, for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her children, for children which she has had by a stranger are naturally strangers also. She must, however, at the same time remain with the husband, and endeavour to transform him from a stranger into her own husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is not intended permanently to unite two beings. When anything in the one is not agreeable to the other, they return the ring and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving, Ellida, Mrs. Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true marriage (Relling). This is Ibsen’s doctrine concerning marriage. It leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It amply suffices for the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian poet’s intellect.

Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering contradictions, Ibsen’s mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable. We have seen in _The Lady from the Sea_ that Ellida wishes to abandon her husband, because her marriage is not a true one, and because her husband has become a stranger to her. Why is he a stranger to her? Because he has married her without mutual close acquaintance. ‘You had only seen me and spoken a few words to me.’ She ought not to have let herself be provided for. ‘Rather the meanest labour, rather the most wretched surroundings, so long as they were the result of free will, of free choice.’ From this one can only reasonably conclude that Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless the woman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has had full freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these conditions existed in the case of the first claimant for her hand. ‘The first--that might have been a complete and real marriage.’ Now, the same Ellida, a few pages before (78), says that she knew absolutely nothing concerning her lover; she did not even know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is spoken of throughout the piece only as ‘the stranger.’

WANGEL. What else do you know about him?

ELLIDA. Only that he went to sea very young; and that he had been on long voyages.

WANGEL. Is there nothing more?

ELLIDA. No; we never spoke of such things.

WANGEL. Of what did you speak, then?

ELLIDA. About the sea!

And she betrothed herself to him

Because he said I must.

WANGEL. You must? Had you no will of your own, then?

ELLIDA. Not when he was near.

So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason that, previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly know him, and she must go to ‘the stranger,’ of whom she knows nothing. Her marriage with Wangel is no marriage, because she did not enter into it with perfect freedom of will, but the marriage with ‘the stranger’ will be ‘perfect and pure,’ although when she betrothed herself to him she had ‘no will of her own.’ After this example of his mental maze, it is truly humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning the intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet of the future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself the labour of referring to his other absurdities.

In this same _Lady from the Sea_, Ellida renounces her project of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the ‘stranger,’ as soon as Wangel says ‘with aching heart’: ‘Now you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.’ She remains with Wangel. She chooses him. ‘Whence came the change?’ asks Wangel and the reader with him. ‘Ah, don’t you understand,’ Ellida gushingly replies, ‘that the change came--was bound to come--when I could choose in freedom!’ (p. 141). This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete contrast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives her her freedom; but she was still freer on the first occasion, because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not need to begin by setting her free. As little was external coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently after marriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She has come into no property since her marriage, so far as we know from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to explain the change? There is none. It exists in the confused thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself definitively; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy--experimental marriage.

We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. In _Ghosts_ Oswald Alving’s disease is represented as a chastisement for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love. Now, Oswald’s state is the consequence of a complaint which may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know better than that. They know hundreds--nay, thousands--of cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen’s drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be a monster of immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an insane son; and his son could be insane without more culpability on the part of the father than is the case with all men who have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother the intermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of Oswald a panegyric on concubinage--one of the most incredible things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ‘What are they to do?’ replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ‘A poor young artist--a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to get married.’ I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ‘free union,’ and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen’s infantine fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum, very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow to the girl he has persuaded to live with him; and religious marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of the civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something agreeable without undertaking any serious duties; or, finally, in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least, excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love, and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their intention to be faithful to each other unto death.

But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying, and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ‘living out one’s life.’ But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of her husband? That all should remain chaste and pure, an idea worked out by Bjornson in his _Glove_? No. She is led by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and the law are bad. ‘Oh, that perpetual law and order!’ she exclaims (p. 154); ‘I often think it is that which does all the mischief here in the world.... I can endure all this constraint and cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work my way out to freedom.’ What in the world has Alving’s story to do with ‘law and order?’ and how does ‘freedom’ enter into this _Credo_? What connection with the piece have the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into applause. In Tahiti neither ‘order’ nor ‘morals’ reign in the sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties have all the ‘freedom’ to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ‘work her way out,’ and the men so ‘live out their lives’ that ships’ officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. And in that very region Chamberlain Alving’s disease is so widespread that, according to Ibsen’s medical theory, all the young Tahitians must be Oswalds.

But this is a constant habit of Ibsen’s, evidenced in all his pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ‘I don’t know what religion is,’ Nora says in the well-known scene where she leaves her husband (p. 114). ‘... I know nothing but what our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true.... I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I thought they were; but I can’t convince myself that they are right.’ Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her father’s name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39): ‘The laws inquire little into motives.’ The whole of this scene, in view of which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play, and does not originally spring from it. If Nora wishes to abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. In _The Pillars of Society_ Bernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces his avowal with the words (p. 110): ‘Let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum,’ etc. ‘Speak for yourself, Bernick, speak for yourself,’ one might well call out to the old wind-bag, who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual case. ‘I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made within the last few days,’ exclaims Stockmann in _An Enemy of the People_, ‘the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ That may in itself be true; but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato’s republic it might happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general proposition that ‘our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ In _Rosmersholm_, Brendel says in an obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with foreboding (p. 23): ‘We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.’ This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow in the eye in the place where it occurs, for _Rosmersholm_ has no connection with any definite period of time; and it is not necessary to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas--to any age or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.

We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who wish to pick a quarrel: ‘Sir, why did you look at me in that way?’ ‘Pardon me, I did not look at you.’ ‘What! you say, then, that I lie?’ ‘I said nothing of the sort.’ ‘You give me the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.’ This is Ibsen’s method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead, however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naïve farces of our fathers. Cleanse Ibsen’s dramas of these pasted-on phrases, and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as ‘modern’ productions; there will remain only a tissue of absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures, not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis--_i.e._, some anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world without seeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself. In contradiction to the saying of the poet, ‘All that is human is alien to him,’ and his own ‘I’ alone occupies him and absorbs his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem wherein he says, ‘Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day over one’s own self.’[342]

The ‘ghost in the heart and brain’ is the obsessions and impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is nothing but a ‘judgment day’ of the poet over himself, cannot be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with distinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the chief events and central characters are always astonishingly absurd and alien to all the realities of the world.

It is in _Brand_ that Ibsen’s absurdity apparently achieves its greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiterated _ad nauseam_ that this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard’s crazy ‘Either-Or.’ Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ‘all or nothing,’ and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. What he especially understands by these high-sounding words the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, however, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness, and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the following wonderful information (p. 151): ‘How long will the struggle last?’ (viz., the climbing, for there is no other struggle in this Act). ‘It lasts until life’s end. Until you have sacrificed all; until you are freed from your compact; until that which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.’ (What this is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ‘Until every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from the All or Nothing. And your sacrifices? All the gods which with you take the place of the eternal God; the shining golden chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid slothfulness. The reward of victory? Unity of will, activity of faith, pureness of soul.’ Naturally on listening to this ranting the good people ‘come to their senses and go home,’ but the lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want to pant uphill in order to ‘wish for something unswervingly,’ to attain to ‘all or nothing,’ and to arrive at ‘unity of will.’ For it is ‘the all’ which seems to inhabit mountains; not merely freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (‘Liberty dwells in the mountains,’ Schiller has said.)

And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling impulse,[343] who with furious passion are continually and reiteratingly talking of ‘the goal’ which they wish to attain, but who neither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is, nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his inflexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.

Ibsen’s absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an idea than the ‘tra-la-la’ sung to a song of which one has forgotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest of function[344] in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are continuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of profundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recognises them as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import. Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in consternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of their table companions at the habitual café. I will give some illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.

Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated between intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis of the centres of ideation.

In _The Lady from the Sea_ (p. 25) Lyngstrand says: ‘I am to a certain extent a little infirm.’[345] This ‘to a certain extent’ is admirable! Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic projects (p. 51):

As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great work--a group, _as they call it_.

ARNHOLM. Is there anything else?

LYNGSTRAND. Yes, there is to be another figure--_a sort of apparition, as they say_.

As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that he intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the sculptor’s mouth. But in _Hedda Gabler_, Brack, a sharp and clever _bon vivant_, says (p. 87): ‘But as far as regards myself, you know very well that I have always entertained a--a certain respect for the marriage tie, _generally speaking_, Mrs. Hedda.’ In _Rosmersholm_ Brendel says (p. 24): ‘So you see when golden dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I fashioned them into poems, into visions, into pictures--_in the rough_, as it were, you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I have enjoyed in my time! The mysterious bliss of creation--_in the rough_, as I said.’ Rector Kroll says (p. 18): ‘A family that now soon for some centuries has held its place as the first in the land.’[346] ‘Now soon for some centuries’! That means that it is not yet ‘some centuries,’ but ‘soon’ will be ‘some centuries.’ Hence ‘soon’ must include in itself ‘some centuries.’ By what miracle? In _The Wild Duck_ we have the intentionally, but, in their exaggeration impossibly, idiotic conversations of the ‘fat,’ ‘bald,’ and ‘short-sighted’ gentlemen in the first act, but also this remark by Gina, who is in no way depicted as an idiot (p. 270):

Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father when he comes home in the evening?

HEDWIG. Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time.

GINA. Yes, _there is something [true][347] in that_!!

In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal, Gregers and Hjalmar we read (p. 289):

EKDAL. He was out in a boat, _you see_, and he shot her. But father’s sight is pretty bad now. H’m; he only wounded her.

GREGERS. Ah! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose.

HJALMAR. Yes, _two or three_....

GREGERS. And she thrives all right in the garret there?

HJALMAR. Yes, wonderfully well. She’s got fat. She’s been in there so long now that she’s forgotten her natural wild life, and it all depends on that.

GREGERS. _You’re right there_, Hjalmar.

And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle (p. 305):

HEDWIG. ... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new basket for the wild duck.

GREGERS. So you could; and it was, strictly speaking, your business, wasn’t it?

HEDWIG. Yes, for she’s _my_ wild duck.

GREGERS. _Of course she is!_

Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively profound, but in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness.

In _A Doll’s House_ (p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion: ‘Well, after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and get them safe in;’ to which Rank significantly replies: ‘Yes, so people say. And it is that very consideration which turns society into a hospital.’ What does this meditative and oracular speech mean? Is it Rank’s opinion that society is a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it would be healthy if its sick were not cared for? Would the untended sick be any less sick? If he believes that he believes an idiocy. Or are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in this manner got rid of? If he preaches that, he preaches a barbarism and a crime, and that is not in accordance with Rank’s character as Ibsen depicts him. We may turn and twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always find either stupidity or want of meaning.

In _Rosmersholm_, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ‘devote all his life and all his energies to this one thing--the creation of a true democracy in this country.’ And, wonderful to relate, the persons to whom Rosmer says these words all seem to comprehend what the ‘true democracy’ is. Without being asked, Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of his Pythian utterance: ‘I want to awaken the democracy to its true task--that of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by setting free their minds and purifying their wills.... I will only try to arouse them to their task. They themselves must accomplish it ... by their own strength. There is no other.... Peace and joy and mutual forbearance must once more enter into their souls.’ Rebecca repeats to him his programme (p. 62):

You were to set resolutely to work in the world--the living world of to-day, as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to home; to win over minds and wills; to create noble men around you in wider and wider circles. Noblemen.

ROSMER. Joyful noblemen.

REBECCA. Yes, joyful.

ROSMER. For it is joy that ennobles the mind.

It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer going ‘from home to home’ ‘in wider and wider circles,’ and making the persons before whom he talks into ‘joyful noblemen,’ while he ‘awakens’ them and ‘purifies their wills,’ and thus ‘creates a true democracy.’ This rigmarole is, it is true, incomprehensible; but, at all events, it must be something agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs ‘joy’ to create ‘noblemen.’ And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly discovers (p. 102): ‘The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.’ What! Rosmer kill happiness when he ‘goes from home to home,’ awakening, winning, making people free, etc., and creating joyful noblemen? The word ‘joyful’ includes, at least, something of happiness, and yet the education of men to ‘joyful noblemen’ is to kill happiness? Rosmer finds (p. 97) ‘the work of ennobling men’s minds is not for him. And, besides, it is so hopeless in itself.’ This is in a measure intelligible, though it is not stated from what experience Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite beyond comprehension is Rebecca’s speech about the fatal influence of ‘the Rosmer view of life.’ In _Ghosts_, Mrs. Alving endeavours to explain her defunct husband’s vagaries in this balderdash (p. 187): ‘When he was a young lieutenant, he was brimming over with the joy of life. It was like a breezy day only to look at him. And what exuberant strength and vitality there was in him! And then, child of joy as he was--for he _was_ like a child at the time--he had to live here at home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him, but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an office. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant, only loungers and boon companions.’ These antitheses seem to have something in them; but if we seriously set about hunting for a definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ‘Object in life--office’--‘work--business’--‘comrades--boon companions,’ are not in themselves oppositions, but become such through the individual. With a decent man they are perfectly coincident; with a base man they fall into opposition. A large or a small town has nothing to do with it. For Kant in the small town of Kœnigsberg, in the last century, the ‘office’ was ‘the object in life,’ ‘work’ was ‘business,’ and he so chose his ‘boon companions’ that they were at the same time his ‘comrades,’ as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other hand, there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle of men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could feel at ease and in inward harmony.

In _Hedda Gabler_ we find quite a multitude of such words, apparently saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ‘It was the passion for life in you!’ exclaims Lövborg to Hedda (p. 128), with the seeming conviction that he has, in this utterance, explained something to her. And Hedda says (p. 142): ‘_I_ see him before me. With vine-leaves in his hair. Hot and bold’ (p. 151). ‘And Ejlert Lövborg, he is sitting with vine-leaves in his hair, and reading aloud’ (p. 157). ‘Had he vine-leaves in his hair?’ (p. 171). ‘So that is how it all happened. Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair’ (p. 188).

HEDDA. Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully?

LÖVBORG. Gracefully? With vine-leaves in my hair?

‘With vine-leaves in his hair;’ ‘the passion for life’--these are words meaning, in the connection assigned to them, absolutely nothing, but giving scope for dreaming. In a few instances Ibsen employs these dreamily-nebulous, shadowy expressions with poetic licence, _e.g._, when we read in _The Pillars of Society_ (p. 19):

RÖRLUND. Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me?

DINA. Because you teach me so much that is beautiful.

RÖRLUND. Beautiful? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful?

DINA. Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing; but when I hear you speak, it makes me think of so much that is beautiful.

RÖRLUND. What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing?

DINA. I have never thought of that.

RÖRLUND. Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful thing?

DINA. A beautiful thing is something great and far away.

Dina is a young girl living under sad and painful conditions. It is psychologically accurate that she should condense all her longing for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional colouring, such as ‘beautiful.’ It is the same with the dialogue between Gregers and Hedwig in _The Wild Duck_ (p. 53):

GREGERS. And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the sea.

HEDWIG. Why do you say ‘in the depths of the sea’?

GREGERS. What else could I say?

HEDWIG. You could say ‘the bottom of the sea’ [or ‘at the bottom of the water’].[348]

GREGERS. Oh, mayn’t I just as well say the depths of the sea?

HEDWIG. Yes; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak of the depths of the sea.

GREGERS. Why so?...

HEDWIG. ... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that’s so stupid.... Because it’s only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].

Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty (Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is changing, and that she willingly plays with fire); hence it is natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams, and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting something far away and wild, such as ‘in the depths of the sea,’ with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous surging in her. But when expressions of this sort are used, not by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.

These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words ‘joy of life’ appear in _Ghosts_ (p. 176):

OSWALD. ... She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).

MRS. ALVING. What were you saying about the joy of life?

OSWALD. Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life?--always, always upon the joy of life? (p. 187).

MRS. ALVING. You spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father.... He was brimming over with the joy of life.

In _Hedda Gabler_ the word ‘beauty’ plays a similar part (p. 190):

HEDDA (_to_ Lövborg). _You_ use it [the pistol] now.... And do it beautifully (p. 214).

_Hedda._ I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lövborg’s suicide] (p. 219).

HEDDA. A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of voluntary courage to take place in the world. Something over which there falls a veil of unintentional beauty.... And then now--the great act! That over which the sense of beauty falls!

The ‘vine-leaves in the hair,’ in the same piece, belongs with equal exactness to this category of words, amounting to an obsession. The use of expressions full of mystery, incomprehensible to the hearer, and either freely coined by the speaker, or endowed by him with a peculiar sense, deviating from that usually assigned them in speech, is one of the most frequent phenomena among the mentally deranged. Griesinger[349] often lays stress on this, and A. Marie[350] adduces some characteristic examples of words and phrases, either newly invented or employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which have been repeated by the insane.

Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a dweller on the borderland--a ‘mattoid.’ His use of formalized expressions does not therefore go so far as the invention of new words, as cited by Dr. Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious meaning to the expressions ‘beauty,’ ‘joy of life,’ ‘courage of life,’ etc., and one which they do not possess when rationally used, follows clearly enough from the examples quoted.

Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense, corresponding to conversations held in dreams, and the silly rambling speech of persons suffering from fever or acute mania. In _The Lady from the Sea_, Ellida says (p. 39): ‘The water in the fjord here is sick, ... yes, sick. And I believe it makes one sick, too’ (p. 79). ‘We’ (Ellida and the ‘stranger’) ‘spoke of the gulls and the eagles, and all the other sea-birds. I think--isn’t it wonderful?--when we talked of such things it seemed to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one with him.... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too’ (p. 100).

I don’t think the dry land is really our home.... I think that if only men had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea, or _in_ the sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are--with better and happier....

ARNHOLM (_jestingly_). Well, perhaps! But it can’t be helped. We’ve once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it’s too late to make good the mistake now.

ELLIDA. Yes, you’ve spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as a secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause for the sadness of men.

And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says (p. 129):

And then she is so changeable, so capricious--she varies so suddenly.

ARNHOLM. No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind.

WANGEL. Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That is the matter(!!).

We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory, blurred, deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and the dream-like drivel, have essentially conduced to obtain for Ibsen his particular admirers. Over them hysterical mystics can dream, like Dina and Hedwig, over the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘in the depths of the sea.’ As they mean absolutely nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them whatever significance may be suggested by the play of association under the influence of momentary emotion. They are, moreover, exceedingly grateful material for the (so-called) ‘comprehensives,’ for whom nothing is ever obscure. ‘Comprehensives’ always explain everything. The greater the idiocy, the more involved, the richer in import, the more exhaustive is its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance with which these beings of ‘perfect comprehension’ look down upon the barbarian, who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian.

In an exceedingly amusing French farce, _Le Homard_, a husband suddenly returning home one evening surprises a stranger with his wife. The latter does not lose her presence of mind, and says to the husband that, having suddenly been seized with illness, she had sent her maid for the first available doctor, and that this gentleman was the doctor. The husband thanks the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if he has already prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is not a doctor, tries to make himself scarce; but the anxious husband insists on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a glance at it; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ‘And will the chemist be able to read that?’ asks the husband, shaking his head. ‘As if it were print,’ asseverates the false physician, again trying to make his escape. The husband, however, adjures him to remain, and holds him fast until the maid returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she makes her appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe. No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and some powders. ‘Did the chemist give you those?’ demands the Galen in bewilderment. ‘Certainly.’ ‘On my prescription?’ ‘Of course it was on your prescription,’ replies the astonished maid. ‘Has the chemist made some mistake?’ interposes the troubled husband. ‘No, no,’ our Galen hastens to reply; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time, and becomes lost in reverie.

These ‘comprehensives’ are like the chemist in _Le Homard_. They read with fluency all Ibsen’s prescriptions, and especially those containing absolutely no written characters, but simply crow’s feet devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to supply critical pills and electuaries when a piece of paper is brought to them bearing the signature of a self-styled doctor, and they dispense them without wincing, be there anything of any sort, or even nothing, on the slip of paper. Is it not significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the French mystic De Vogué, one of these ‘comprehensives,’ finds to praise is one of the meaningless phrases above cited?[351]

A final stigma of Ibsen’s mysticism must be considered--his symbolism. In _The Wild Duck_, this bird is the symbol of Hjalmar’s destiny, and the garret next the photographic studio a symbol of the ‘living lie,’ of which, according to Relling, everyone stands in need. In _The Lady from the Sea_, Lyngstrand wishes to make a group which shall be the symbol of Ellida, as the ‘stranger’ with the changing eyes of a fish is of the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ‘stranger’ is really the symbol of a symbol. In _Ghosts_, the burning of the asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving’s ‘living lie,’ and the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole piece the symbol of the depressed and sullen frame of mind of the personages in action. Ibsen’s earlier pieces, _Emperor and Galilean_, _Brand_, _Peer Gynt_, literally swarm with symbols. A mysterious collateral significance is given to every figure and every stage accessory, and every word includes a double meaning. From the ‘Psychology of Mysticism’ we already know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus of the wholly unconnected representations springing up in consciousness through the play of automatic association, that it attributes hidden but essential reference to each other in these representations. The ‘comprehensives’ believe they have said all when, with an extremely consequential and self-satisfied air, they demonstrate that the ‘stranger’ in _The Lady from the Sea_ signifies the sea, and the sea freedom. They quite overlook the fact that the thing to be explained is not what the poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in particular, why he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all. In the well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet calls ‘a cat a cat.’ That to express so sober an idea as that persons of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep longing for a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should have the whim to invent a ‘stranger with fish-like eyes,’ presupposes a diseased mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency to allegory and symbolism is very common. ‘Intricate arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic gestures and attitudes, strange interpretations of natural events, punning, word-coining, and peculiar modes of expression, frequently occurring in paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque colouring.’ Thus writes Tanzi,[352] and in the symbolism of the insane he saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism. Among men low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in fact, the habitual form of thought. We know the reason--their brain is not yet trained to attention; it is too weak to suppress irrational associations, and refers all that shoots through its consciousness to some chance phenomenon either just perceived, or else remembered.

After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we have become acquainted--his theological obsessions of original sin, of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his symbolism--he might be numbered among the mystic degenerates with which I have concerned myself in the previous chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his place among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic than his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of anarchism. He is in a state of constant revolt against all that exists. He never exercises rational criticism with regard to this; he never shows what is bad, why it is bad, and how it could be made better. No; he only reproaches it with its existence, and has only one longing--to destroy it. ‘The ruin of everything’ was the programme of certain destructives in 1848, and has remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem, _To my Friend the Destructive Orator_. In this he glorifies the deluge as the ‘sole revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler’ (_Halohedsfusker_); but even it was not radically ruinous enough. ‘We want to make it still more radical, but for that end we need men and orators. You charge yourselves with flooding the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully a torpedo under the ark.’[353] In a series of letters offered by elephant-driver Brandes for the edification of the adorers of Ibsen, the poet gives conspicuous specimens of his theories.[354] The state must be destroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for freedom has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its own end. As soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and cease to fight for it, we prove it to be lost to us. The meritorious thing in the fight for liberty is the state of permanent revolt against all existing things which it presupposes. There is nothing fixed and permanent. ‘Who warrants me that in the planet Jupiter twice two are not five?’ (This remark is an unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt,[355] which in recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true marriage. Friends are a costly luxury. ‘They have long hindered me from being myself.’ The care of the ‘I’ is the sole task of man. He ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it by any law or any consideration.

These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also puts into the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already cited some of Mrs. Alving’s and Nora’s ego-maniacal and anarchical phrases. In _The Pillars of Society_, Dina says (p. 19): ‘If only the people I lived amongst weren’t so proper and moral. Every day Hilda and Netta come here that I may take example by them. I can never be as well behaved as they are, and I _won’t be_’ (p. 44).

But I wanted to know, too, if people over there [in America] are very--very moral ... if they are so--so proper and well-behaved as here.

JOHAN. Well, at any rate, they’re not so bad as people here think.

DINA. You don’t understand me. What I want is just that they should not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness.

MARTHA BERNICK. Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and convention! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and-wont!

In _An Enemy of the People_ (p. 278) Stockmann declares: ‘I detest leading men ... they stand in the path of a free man wherever he turns--and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other noxious animals.’ (p. 280) ‘The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are the compact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal majority--they it is.... The majority is never right.... The minority is always right.’ Where Ibsen does not seriously attack the majority he derides it--_e.g._, when he entrusts the maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. In _An Enemy of the People_ (p. 238):