by S. T. Joshi
But Mme. Modjeska was a cosmopolitan and lacked entirely that insular folie which sees a foe in every foreigner. She knew Shakespeare and she knew Molière, just as she knew Scribe, Augier and Tom Robertson.6 To her the stage was a world, and all languages but dialects of the universal emotional tongue. Ibsen swam into her ken almost automatically and as a matter of course. At her behest “A Doll’s House” was done into Polish,7 and she played Nora at the Imperial Theatre, in Warsaw. And like Mr. Archer8 after her, she felt the surge of revolution in the searching phrases of that last, portentous scene. “Before all else I am a human being”—here was the boundary mark between the old drama and the new. Nora stood for heterodoxy, for evolution, for individualism, for the future; and so it seemed not unreasonable to hope that the Americans, who were heterodox and all else startling, and thought in terms of the future, would sense her vitality and reality.
There ensued a diligent and somewhat discouraging search for a translator. Twice before this the play had been done into the English vulgate, but I doubt if Mme. Modjeska was acquainted with these translations. Even had she known them, she could not have used them, for one was the reductio ad absurdum of the immortal Weber (of whom more anon) and the other was the scarcely less grotesque version of Miss Henrietta Frances Lord, whereby Ibsen was turned into an eloquent special pleader for woman’s rights.9 At all events, the Polish tragedienne looked elsewhere.
There was a gleam of hope when a volunteer “by the name of Miss Dill” appeared in London, but the translation of this fair scribe “was such poor work,” Mme. Modjeska once told me, “that I could not use it.” The given name and further qualities and station of Miss Dill are lost to the chronicles. Then came Count Charles Bozenta-Chlapowski to the rescue. Count Bozenta was Mme. Modjeska’s husband and a man of uncommon gifts. He made a translation of the piece from Polish into English; Mme. Modjeska’s secretary, a Danish girl named Louise Everson, compared it to the original Dano-Norwegian; and Maurice Barrymore, then leading man of the Modjeska company, looked to its idioms. The result was a single performance at Macauley’s Theatre, Louisville, on Friday evening, December 7, 1883—six years before either London or New York saw the play.
Here was pioneering with a vengeance—but also with a reservation, for Mme. Modjeska made Nora turn back at the brink. According to a contemporary reviewer, “there was some indefinite talk about religion,” and the rebellious wife, standing satchel in hand at the door, suffered herself to be forgiven and held back. But inasmuch as Ibsen himself, as we shall see, had done the same thing four years before (albeit he had repented of it soon afterward), it is not well to judge Mme. Modjeska harshly for her sacrilege. She believed in Ibsen, and she was valiant enough to support her faith with dollars.
The theatregoers of Louisville, however, showed no enthusiasm. The night before they had seen Modjeska as Rosalind, and the night after they were to shed willing tears over her Marguerite Gautier.10 Therefore, Nora appeared to them as a personage preposterous and incredible. No boohs came from them, but they sat stolid and amazed. They were, to borrow Mr. Archer’s words, “face to face with a new thing in drama—an order of experience, at once intellectual and emotional, not hitherto attained in the theatre.”11 But they didn’t know it, nor were they to know it for a long, long while. “Our experience seemed to prove,” said Mme. Modjeska, in after years, “that the public was not yet ripe for Ibsen. . . . Such was the opinion of Mr. Henry Watterson, as well as of Mr. Johnson, the dramatic editor of the Courier-Journal. In consequence, we gave up the play.”12 Thus poor Ibsen, like many an American statesman before and after him, was waved away from the Hall of Fame by the lordly hand of Col. Watterson. And Mr. Johnson acquiesced.
Then came drear and weary years, during which Ibsen threatened to become a mere philosophical abstraction. The arguments for and against him became tenuous and transcendental. He arose above brute reality and the common perceptions, and it began to be believed that an understanding of him was possible only to the ultra-violet temperament. Thus the Ibsen cult was born, and the just ridicule it inspired kept the Norwegian himself from a fair hearing. Between 1882 and 1887 but nine articles upon his dramas appeared in the more serious reviews in English, and of these the faithful Archer wrote three.
But if the sober quarterlies would have none of him, he was still the theme of a rising literature. His play asked a question which demanded an answer, and the answer was given by many a fantastic print. As far back as 1881, a Norwegian named M. J. Bugge published a pamphlet, “Hvorledes Nora kom hjm igjen” (“When Nora Came Home Again”) at Christiana.13 It paved the way for an avalanche of hair-splitting treatises, to which Boston contributed Ednah D. Cheney’s “Nora’s Return.”14 In London an expatriated Alsatian, Henry Herman by name, took Nora’s troubles so much to heart that he conceived the idea of ending them. Incredible as it may seem, he interested Henry Arthur Jones in the enterprise, and the result was a play called “Breaking a Butterfly,” which had its first and last performance in March, 1884, at the Prince’s Theatre, London.15 This curious drama was “A Doll’s House,” denaturized and dephlogisticated. In it Nora became Flora Goddard, and Krogstad, Dunkley. Mrs. Linde was dropped out of the drama, and Krogstad was provided with a hopeless passion for Nora. Toward the middle of the action Ibsen was thrown to the fishes, and Nora was saved from suicide, rebellion, flight and immortality by making a faithful old clerk steal her fateful promissory note from Krogstad’s desk. Beerbohm Tree was the transmogrified Krogstad; Kyrle Bellew was the Helmer and Miss Lingard was the Nora. The curtain fell upon a happy home.
A year later there was a rash effort to acquaint London with “Et Du kkehjem” unalloyed, but the oracles were against it. Triply handicapped by a bad translation (Miss Lord’s), a dingy hall, and a company of actors bred in the school of Bulwer-Lytton and H. J. Byron,16 the single performance appealed chiefly to the comic sense. Instead of arousing interest, it turned the clock backward. Four years waxed and waned before the partisans of the Norwegian tried again. This time they had the translation of Mr. Archer, the services of Miss Achurch, the valiant support of Messrs. Walkley17 and Shaw, and the use of a real playhouse upon a main thoroughfare. And so, on July 7, 1889, they presented “A Doll’s House” at the Novelty Theatre, and the echoes thereof are not yet stilled.
Four months later, on October 30, 1889, Miss Beatrice Cameron (afterward Mrs. Richard Mansfield)18 played Nora at the Globe Theatre in Boston. Mervyn Dallas was the Krogstad, Atkins Lawrence was the Helmer, and Herbert Druce was the Dr. Rank. The translation used was that of Mr. Archer, but little Ivar seems to have been dropped out of the play, for his name does not appear upon the yellowing playbill. Miss Cameron soon took her company to New York, and the theatregoers of Broadway had their first glimpse of Nora on Wednesday afternoon, December 21, at Palmer’s (afterward Wallack’s) Theatre. A tour to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago and St. Louis followed, and until she finally retired from the stage, Miss Cameron occasionally played “A Doll’s House”—chiefly at Wednesday matinées—but it cannot be said that she ever encountered a very pressing popular demand for the play. In all, she probably impersonated Nora less than thirty times.
Mrs. Fiske’s record, I am informed by her manager, is “approximately twenty-five performances.”19 She did not essay the rôle until nearly five years after Miss Cameron had attempted it. During these years the Ibsen battle had been fought and won in London, and the Norwegian, though still a suspicious exotic upon the American stage, was already an old story to the American newspapers and woman’s clubs. Mrs. Fiske’s Ibsen début was made at the Empire Theatre, New York, on the afternoon of February 15, 1894, and her success was immediate. It was, indeed, a memorable first performance in more ways than one, for it gave Mrs. Fiske a secure place at the very head of her profession, and it marked the end of Ibsen’s career as an interesting curiosity, and the beginning of his acceptance as a serious rival to the great gods of the past. “I used Mr. Archer’s translatio
n,” Mrs. Fiske tells me, “and also blended with it certain things I found in an older translation of the play. (Miss Lord’s, no doubt.) I did not make any material change.”
Weber’s pioneer translation of “A Doll’s House” was printed in Copenhagen in 1880, as a thin pamphlet of ninety-one pages, with a pink paper cover. It was dedicated to “Her Royal Highness, Alexandra, Princess of Wales,” by her “most humble servant, T. Weber.” This Weber was a schoolmaster, and wrote a number of English grammar books for “the Danish church and school department.” A Danish friend of mine remembers him as an elderly person of severe aspect, whose fame as a pedagogue was swallowed up by his greater notoriety as a pedagogue and reformer. There was a law in Copenhagen in those days providing that any householder who set a pot of flowers on a window-sill above the first floor should fasten it securely by ropes, wires or chains, lest a gust of wind send it crashing down upon the head of some luckless passerby. Weber, says my Danish friend, progressed through the city upon lengthy excursions, noting violations of the statute and haling the offenders before the magistrates. This testified to his public spirit, but scarcely widened his circle of personal admirers.
Weber’s English reminds me at times of the most gorgeous flights of Babu eloquence, and at other times of the marvelous syntax of that other Weber who once engaged, to our vast delight, in nightly colloquys with a certain Mr. Fields. He begins hopefully with the entrance of Nora:
There is a ring at the bell of the corridor. It is heard a little afterwards that a door is opened. Enter Nora humming delightfully.
Then comes the porter with the Christmas tree and Nora gives him a shilling, waving away the proffered change with a regal “No, keep the whole!” After that—
The porter thanks and goes. Nora shuts the door. Then she takes out of her pocket a cornet with macaroons.
The “cornet” puzzles, but at once we are in the midst of Nora’s first debate with Torvald. Thus:
TORVALD: Has my thoughtless bird again dissipated money?
NORA: It is the First Christmas we need not to spare.
TORVALD: Know that we cannot dissipate!
And so the genial Weber goes on, mauling the English tongue with a clear conscience and a glad heart. When Mrs. Linde enters, Nora observes that she is “a little paler—and perhaps a little more meagre.” “And much, more older,” says the sad Mrs. Linde. When Krogstad arrives and begins his ungentlemanly quizzing, Nora turns upon him with “How dare you close-question me, mr. Krogstad.” I preserve the lower case “mr.” And when Torvald returns she and he thus confer:
NORA: I am looking forward with excessive pleasure to the fancy-dress ball . . .
TORVALD: And I am excessively inquisitive to see by which you will surprise me.
NORA: Alas, that stupid sally (?)
TORVALD: Well?
NORA: I cannot hit upon something good. What I hit is so foolish.
TORVALD: Has little Nora come to that acknowledgment?
But it is toward the end of the play that Weber shines most brightly. When the pair return from the Stenborg’s ball and Torvald grows clumsily amorous, Nora freezes him with “So you must not speak to me this night,” to which Torvald sagely replies, “You are still thinking of the tarantella, I remark.”
After Krogstad passes out of their lives forever, Torvald’s eloquent forgiveness takes voice:
You wanted but thorough knowledge to form a judgment of the expedients. . . . You must not take to heart the angry words I told you in the first consternation as I thought that all would fall over me. . . . Rest yourself safely. . . . Here I am to keep you like a chased pigeon. . . .
In the last scene of all Weber, fearful of unwitting sacrilege, translates literally:
TORVALD: You are first of all wife and mother.
NORA: I believe that I am first of all a man. . . .
TORVALD: You have moral feeling, I hope? Or, answer me, have you perhaps none?
NORA: I don’t know it at all. These things have quite put me to a stand. I know but that I have quite another opinion than you concerning such.
Nora proceeds to elucidate the point. “I have been waiting so patiently,” she says, “for eighty years for——Good Heavens! I understand well that the wonderful does not appear every day!” My copy of Weber has many manuscript corrections made by some early owner, or possibly, by Weber himself, but this “eighty” has not been changed to “eight.” The curtain falls upon a final on-slaught upon the suffering language. Nora stops at the door and discourses of the “wonderful” (the miracle) which must come—
“—that cohabitation between you and me might become a matrimony. Good-bye!”
And so Torvald sinks into his despair and bitterness, and—“it is heard that the gate is slammed.”
The translators of Ibsen seem to take an unaccountable delight in changing the names of the characters in “A Doll’s House.” The ingenuous Weber inaugurated the custom by clipping the final “e” from the appellation of Helene, the housemaid, and by transforming Anne-Marie into Ann-Mary—the last, no doubt, a well-meaning effort in the direction of the English Mary Ann. Weber retained the Scandinavian spelling of Mrs. Linde’s given name—Kristine—but he provided that of Helmer with a supernumerary “h,” making it Thorvald instead of Torvald. In the Modjeska version Torvald became Oswald and Nora, Thora.
Miss Lord, going further, transformed Mrs. Linde into Mrs. Linden, Helene into Ellen and Anne-Marie into plain Mary Ann. Mr. Archer competed the process by re-christening the last-named Anna. In a footnote to his cast of characters he called attention to the changes, and so forestalled all charges of reckless and thoughtless vandalism, but he offered no account of the reasons suggesting them. I have often wondered why Miss Lord changed the name of Nora’s confidante from Linde to Linden, and why Mr. Archer followed her. Certainly there could have been no fear that the original name was too outlandish, for that of Krogstad has a far more exotic flavor, and besides, there was no effort, in other ways, to rid the play of its Norwegian color. Such an enterprise, indeed, would have been both gratuitous and hopeless.
Count Prozor, Ibsen’s French translator, was careful to make no unnecessary changes, but Wilhelm Lange, who made the “first authorized German translation” distributed new labels with a glad heart.20 For the Krogstad of Ibsen he substituted a Günther of his own, for Torvald he wrote Robert, for Anne-Marie, Marianne, for Mrs. Linde, Mrs. Linden, and for Ivar, Erwin. Incidently he changed the name of the play to “Nora,” a plan also followed by Weber and by Miss Lord in her first edition. This last change had some justification, for it is difficult to translate “Et Dukk ehjem” into English, German or French without sacrificing accuracy to euphony and brevity. Literally, the phrase means “the home of a doll.” It is thus by no means identical in meaning with “a doll-house,” in the sense of a toy house for dolls. But “A Doll’s House” is near enough, and so are “Ein Puppenheim,” and “Maison de Poupée.”
When “Et Dukkehjem” was done into German, a number of German managers prepared to present it, but all of them, it seems, feared that the dénouement was too startling for the public of the time. Some of them employed artisans from the literary half-world to write “happy” endings; one, more worthy than his fellows, placed the matter before Ibsen. This one was the manager of the Thalia Theatre at Hamburg. He had his leading actress, Frau Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, write to the dramatist, who was then in Rome, suggesting that the curtain be brought down upon some sort of a reconciliation. Ibsen, naturally enough, was not greatly pleased by this proposal, but he soon concluded that a “happy” en ding was really necessary—at least for the present—and so he wrote it. But he took good care to save as much of his revolutionary last scene as he could.
M. Lugne-Poé, the French actor-manager, recalled this forgotten ending in a lecture delivered in the Salle des Agriculteurs in Paris, April 21, 1904, but his rendering of it was not accurate. It was designed to be attached to the original text in the last scene of all
. Nora is at the door, preparing to leave husband and children. In the original she goes out. In the Hamburg version:
TORVALD: . . . We must so change that—
NORA: That living together can be a marriage. Good-bye. (She turns to go.) TORVALD: Well then—go! (Grabs her by the arm.) But first you must take a last look at your children.
NORA: Let me go! I don’t want to see them! I can’t.
TORVALD: (Draws her toward the door at the left.) You must see them!
(Opens the door and says softly.) Look; there they sleep, so quiet and care-free. To-morrow morning, when they awake and call for their mother, they’ll be—motherless!
NORA: (Quickly.) Motherless?
TORVALD: As you were.
NORA: Motherless! (An inward struggle. She lets her traveling bag fall and says.) O, I am doing myself a wrong, but I can’t leave them! (Sinks down before the door.)
TORVALD: (Ecstatically, but softly.) Nora!
Ibsen soon made efforts, and with success, to suppress this new ending. We find him writing from Munich, under date of February 15, 1880, to Heinrich Laube, director of the Stadttheatre at Vienna, a short but convincing plea for the original text.
John Paulsen, the Norwegian critic, throws an interesting light upon those troublous times.
“When ‘A Doll’s House’ was published,” he says, “I asked Ibsen why he had called the chief feminine personage Nora, for the name appeared to me to be a very commonplace one. He answered quietly, without hesitation: ‘Why, you must know her name was really Lenora, but they all called her Nora, for she was the pet of the family.’ From this reply we can see how intimately Ibsen entered into the life of his characters. He never doubted their reality.