A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  […]

  The second line of criticism is that which attacks the substance of Ibsen’s so-called doctrines, on the ground that they are neither new nor true. To the former objection one is inclined to answer curtly but pertinendy, ‘Who said they were?’ It is not the business of the creative artist to make the great generalisations which mark the stages of intellectual and social progress. Certainly Ibsen did not discover the theory of evolution or the doctrine of heredity, any more than he discovered gravitation. He was not the first to denounce the subjection of women; he was not the first to sneer at the ‘compact liberal majority’ of our pseudo-democracies. His function is to seize and throw into relief certain aspects of modern life. He shows us society as Kean was said to read Shakespeare – by flashes of lightning – luridly, but with intense vividness. He selects subjects which seem to him to illustrate such and such political, ethical, or sociological ideas; but he does not profess to have invented the ideas. They are common property; they are in the air. A grave injustice has been done him of late by those of his English admirers who have set him up as a social prophet, and have sometimes omitted to mention that he is a bit of a poet as well. It is so much easier to import an idea than the flesh and blood, the imagination, the passion, the style in which it is clothed. People have heard so much of the ‘gospel according to Ibsen’ that they have come to think of him as a mere hot-gospeller, the Boanerges of some strange social propaganda. As a matter of fact Ibsen has no gospel whatever, in the sense of a systematic body of doctrine. He is not a Schopenhauer, and still less a Comte. There never was a less systematic thinker. Truth is not, in his eyes, one and indivisible; it is many-sided, many-visaged, almost Protean. It belongs to the irony of fate that the least dogmatic of thinkers – the man who has said of himself, ‘I only ask: my call is not to answer’ – should figure in the imagination of so many English critics as a dour dogmatist, a vendor of social nostrums in pilule form. He is far more of a paradoxist than a dogmatist. A thinker he is most certainly, but not an inventor of brand new notions such as no one has ever before conceived. His originality lies in giving intense dramatic life to modern ideas, and often stamping them afresh, as regards mere verbal form, in the mint of his imaginative wit.

  The second allegation, that his doctrines are not true, is half answered when we have insisted that they are not put forward (at any rate by Ibsen himself) as a body of inspired dogmas. No man rejects more consistently than he the idea of finality. He does not pretend to have said the last word on any subject. ‘You needn’t believe me unless you like,’ says Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, ‘but truths are not the tough old Methuselahs people take them to be. A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, some seventeen or eighteen years; at most twenty.’ The telling of absolute truths, to put it in another way, is scarcely Ibsen’s aim. He is more concerned with destroying conventional lies, and exorcising the ‘ghosts’ of dead truths; and most of all concerned to make people think and see for themselves. Here again we recognise the essential injustice of regarding a dramatic poet as a sort of prophet-professor, who means all his characters say and makes them say all he means. I have been asked, for example, whether Ibsen intends us to understand by the last scene of A Doll’s House that awakened wives ought to leave their husbands and children in order to cultivate their souls in solitude. Ibsen intends nothing of the sort. He draws a picture of a typical household; he creates a man and woman with certain characteristics; he places them in a series of situations which at once develop their characters and suggest large questions of conduct; and he makes the woman, in the end, adopt a course of action which he (rightly or wrongly) believes to be consistent with her individual nature and circumstances. It is true that this course of action is so devised as to throw the principles at stake into the strongest relief; but the object of that is to make people thoroughly realise the problem, not to force upon them the particular solution arrived at in this particular case. No two life-problems were ever precisely alike, and in stating and solving one, Ibsen does not pretend to supply a ready-made solution for all the rest. He illustrates, or, rather, illumines, a general principle by a conceivable case; that is all. To treat Nora’s arguments in the last scene of A Doll’s House as though they were the ordered propositions of an essay by John Stuart Mill is to give a striking example of the strange literalness of the English mind, its inability to distinguish between drama and dogma. To me that last scene is the most moving in the play, precisely because I hold it the most dramatic. It has been called a piece of pure logic – is it not rather logic conditioned by character and saturated with emotion? Some years ago I saw Et Dukkehjem acted in Christiania. It was an off season; only the second-rate members of the company were engaged; and throughout two acts and a half I sat vainly striving to recapture the emotions I had so often felt in reading the play. But the moment Nora and Helmer were seated face to face, at the words, ‘No, that is just it; you do not understand me; and I have never understood you – till to-night’ – at that moment, much to my own surprise, the thing suddenly gripped my heart-strings; to use an expressive Americanism, I ‘sat up;’ and every phrase of Nora’s threnody over her dead dreams, her lost illusions, thrilled me to the very marrow. Night after night I went to see that scene; night after night I have watched it in the English version; it has never lost its power over me. And why? Not because Nora’s sayings are particularly wise or particularly true, but because, in her own words, they are so true for her, because she feels them so deeply and utters them so exquisitely. Certainly she is unfair, certainly she is one-sided, certainly she is illogical; if she were not, Ibsen would be the pamphleteer he is supposed to be, not the poet he is. ‘I have never been happy here – only merry …. You have never loved me – you have only found it amusing to be in love with me.’ Have we not in these speeches the very mingling of truth and falsehood, of justice and injustice, necessary to humanise the character and the situation? After Nora has declared her intention of leaving her home, Helmer remarks, ‘Then there is only one explanation possible – You no longer love me.’ ‘No,’ she replies, ‘that is just it.’ ‘Nora! can you say so?’ cries Helmer, looking into her eyes. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Torvald,’ she answers, ‘for you’ve always been so kind to me.’Is this pamphleteering? To me it seems like the subdest human pathos. Again, when she says ‘At that moment it became clear to me that I had been living here for eight years, with a strange man and had borne him three children – Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I could tear myself to pieces’ – who can possibly take this for anything but a purely dramatic utterance? It is true and touching in Nora’s mouth, but it is obviously founded on a vague sentiment, that may or may not bear analysis. Nora postulates a certain transcendental community of spirit as the foundation and justification of marriage. The idea is very womanly and may also be very practical; but Ibsen would probably be the first to admit that before it can claim the validity of a social principle we must ascertain whether it be possible for any two human beings to be other than what Nora would call strangers. This further analysis the hearer must carry out for him, or her, self. The poet has stimulated thought; he has not tried to lay down a hard-and-fast rule of conduct. Again, when Helmer says, ‘No man sacrifices his honour even for one he loves,’ and Nora retorts, ‘Millions of women have done that!’ we applaud the consummate claptrap, not on account of its abstract justice, but rather of its characteristic injustice. Logically, it is naught; dramatically, one feels it to be a masterstroke. Here, it is the right speech in the right place; in a sociological monograph it would be absurd. My position, in short, is that in Ibsen’s plays, as in those of any other dramatist who keeps within the bounds of his form, we must look, not for the axioms and demonstrations of a scientific system, but simply for ‘broken lights’ of truth, refracted through character and circumstance.1 The playwright who sends on a Chorus or a lecturer, unconnected with the dramatic action, to moralise the spectacle and put all the dots on all the i’s, may fairl
y be taken to task for the substance of his ‘doctrines.’ But that playwright is Dumas, not Ibsen.

  Lastly, we come to the assertion that Ibsen is a ‘coarse’ writer, with a morbid love for using the theatre as a physiological lecture-room. Here again I can only cry out upon the chance which has led to so grotesque a misconception. He has written some twenty plays, of which all except two might be read aloud, with only the most trivial omissions, in any young ladies’ boarding-school from Tobolsk to Tangiers. The two exceptions are A Doll’s House and Ghosts – the very plays which happen to have come (more or less) within the ken of English critics. In A Doll’s House he touches upon, in Ghosts he frankly faces, the problem of hereditary disease, which interests him, not in itself, but simply as the physical type and symbol of so many social and ethical phenomena. Ghosts I have not space to consider. If art is for ever debarred from entering upon certain domains of human experience, then Ghosts is an inartistic work. I can only say, after having read it, seen it on the stage, and translated it, that no other modern play seems to me to fulfil so entirely the Aristotelian ideal of purging the soul by means of terror and pity. In A Doll’s House, again, there are two passages, one in the second and one in the third act, which Mr. Podsnap could not conveniently explain to the young lady in the dress-circle. Whether the young lady in the dress-circle would be any the worse for having them explained to her is a question I shall not discuss. As a matter of fact, far from being coarsely treated, they are so delicately touched that the young person suspects nothing and is in no way incommoded. It is Mr. Podsnap himself that cries out – the virtuous Podsnap who, at the French theatre, writhes in his stall with laughter at speeches and situations à faire rougir des singes. I have more than once been reproached, by people who had seen A Doll’s House at the Novelty, with having cut the speeches which the first-night critics pronounced objectionable. It has cost me some trouble to persuade them that not a word had been cut, and that the text they found so innocent contained every one of the enormities denounced by the critics. Mr. Podsnap, I may add, has in this case shown his usual alacrity in putting the worst possible interpretation upon things. Dr. Rank’s declaration to Nora that Helmer is not the only man who would willingly lay down his life for her, has been represented as a hideous attempt on the part of a dying debauchee to seduce his friend’s wife. Nothing is further from the mind of poor Rank, who, by the way, is not a debauchee at all. He knows himself to be at death’s door; Nora, in her Doll’s House, has given light and warmth to his lonely, lingering existence; he has silently adored her while standing with her, as with her husband, on terms of frank comradeship; is he to leave her for ever without saying, as he puts it, ‘Thanks for the light’? Surely this is a piece either of inhuman austerity or of prurient prudery; surely Mrs. Podsnap herself could not feel a suspicion of insult in such a declaration. True, it comes inaptiy at that particular moment, rendering it impossible for Nora to make the request she contemplates. But essentially, and even from the most conventional point of view, I fail to see anything inadmissible in Rank’s conduct to Nora. Nora’s conduct to Rank, in the stocking scene, is another question; but that is merely a side-light on the relation between Nora and Helmer, preparatory, in a sense, to the scene before Rank’s entrance in the last act.

  In conclusion, what are the chances that Ibsen’s modern plays will ever take a permanent place on the English stage? They are not great, it seems to me. […] On the other hand I have not the remotest doubt that Ibsen will bulk more and more largely as years go on in the consciousness of all students of literature in general, as opposed to the stage in particular. The creator of Brand and Peer Gynt is one of the great poets of the world.

  4 HEDDA GABLER

  The play

  Ibsen’s preliminary notes for Hedda Gabler are more detailed than for any of his other plays, and allow analysis of his working methods. They show the development from an initial concept (probably late summer 1889), to a complete oudine (spring 1890), along with many scattered jottings, and a detailed scenario for Acts I and II which was probably written after the first draft of Act I. This full-length draft – published in vol. XII of The Works of Henrik Ibsen (edited by William Archer, New York 1912) – was begun in mid-July, thoroughly revised in October and published on December 4, 1890. There are real-life analogues to the main characters. Løvborg was based on Julius Hoffory, a Norwegian professor who went insane in 1890; and Ibsen’s earliest notes revolve around Camilla Collett, the Norwegian novelist and woman’s rights advocate, who had complained that Ibsen used her as a model for the central figure in The Lady from the Sea:

  A married woman more and more imagines that she is an important personality, and as a consequence feels compelled to create for herself a sensational past–

  If an interesting female character appears in a new story or in a play, she believes it is she who is being portrayed.

  The masculine environment helps to confirm her in this belief.

  The two lady friends agree to die together. One of them carries out her end of the bargain, but the other one who realizes what lies in store for her loses her courage. This is the reversal.

  ‘He has such a disgusting way of walking when one sees him from behind.’

  She hates him because he has a goal, a mission in life. The lady friend has one too, but does not dare to devote herself to it. Her personal life treated in fictional form.

  In the second act the manuscript that is left behind –

  The ‘lost soul’ apologizes for the man of culture. The wild horse and the race horse … Revolution against the laws of nature – but nothing stupid, not until the position is secure.

  The issue of a woman’s lack of real outlets for personal fulfillment in a male dominated society was carried over into subsequent versions, together with the female protagonist’s jealousy of a man with a mission in life, and contrasting male figures. In addition certain of the plot details from these first jottings survive into the final play – such as a misplaced manuscript, and a double suicide, botched by one of the participants. However, the protagonist was to change completely; and a slightly later note encapsulates the central elements of the character who emerges as Hedda:

  4.4.1 Notes to Hedda Gabler

  Translated by Evert Sprinchorn;pages 98–100 translated by A.G. Chater

  ¶ The pale, apparently cold beauty. Expects great things of life and the joy of life.

  The man who has now finally won her, plain and simple in appearance, but an honest and talented, broad-minded scholar.

  […]

  ¶ The manuscript that H. L. leaves behind contends that man’s mission is: Upward, toward the bearer of light. Life on the present foundations of society is not worth living. Therefore he escapes from it through his imagination. By drinking, etc. – Tesman stands for correct behavior. Hedda for blasé over sophistication. Mrs. R. is the nervous-hysterical modern individual. Brack represents the personal bourgeois point of view.

  ¶ Then H. departs this world. And the two of them are left sitting there with the manuscript they cannot interpret. And the aunt is with them. What an ironic comment on humanity’s striving for progress and development.

  ¶ But Holger’s double nature intervenes. Only by realizing the basely bourgeois can he win a hearing for his great central idea.

  ¶ Mrs. Rising is afraid that H., although “a model of propriety,” is not normal. She can only guess at his way of thinking but cannot understand it. Quotes some of his remarks –

  ¶ One talks about building railways and highways for the cause of progress. But no, no, that is not what is needed. Space must be cleared so that the spirit of man can make its great turnabout. For it has gone astray. The spirit of man has gone astray.

  ¶ Holger: I have been out. I have behaved obscenely. That doesn’t matter. But the police know about it. That’s what counts.

  ¶ H. L.’s despair lies in that he wants to master the world but cannot master himself.

  ¶ Tesman believe
s that it is he who has in a way seduced H. L. into indulging in excesses again. But that is not so. It is as Hedda has said: that it was he she dreamed of when she talked about “the famous man.” But she does not dare tell Tesman this.

  ¶ To aid in understanding his own character, L. has made notes in “the manuscript.” These are the notes the two of them should interpret, want to interpret, but cannot possibly.