II

HENRIK IBSEN

In 1869, Henrik Ibsen, then forty-one, paused in his dramatic labors to compose a short poem. He had left his beloved Rome just one year before to settle in Dresden (he was to remain in exile from Norway until 1891), and he had just completed his first mature realistic prose play, The League of Youth, after having established his reputation as the author of Brand and Peer Gynt. Since The League of Youth contains strong satire on the hypocritical opportunism of the contemporary Scandinavian Liberal, critics were beginning to charge Ibsen with having joined the Conservative faction. The poem — “To My Friend, the Revolutionary Orator” — is addressed to one of these critics, and is a polemical defense against the current charges. In these verses, Ibsen affirms that he is still a perfervid revolutionary — but he then proceeds to distinguish his own revolt from anything in recorded history. All previous revolutions, he declares, were compromised by their incompleteness — even the Flood, the most radical revolution of all time, left a few survivors aboard Noah’s ark. For him, on the other hand, nothing short of total revolution will suffice: “Your changing pawns is a futile plan;/ Make a sweep of the chessboard, and I’m your man.” Intoxicated by an uncompromising vision of absolute freedom and purity through a total purge of existing life, he announces what he sees as his own part in this revolution: “With pleasure I will torpedo the Ark!”

Torpedo the Ark! No wonder Georg Brandes — Ibsen’s friend, advisor, and best contemporary interpreter — thought him the most radical man he had ever met.¹ Discontented with everything but a new beginning, Ibsen finds it impossible to identify with any existing parties, systems, or programs, or even to ally himself with any existing revolutionary principles. His revolt, in short, is so individualistic that it transcends politics entirely. We would do well to remember, should we ever be tempted to regard Ibsen as the champion of such things as women’s rights, divorce, euthanasia, or cures for syphilis, how sublimely indifferent he is to social amelioration or political reform. As he writes to Brandes two years later, “Yes, to be sure, it is a benefit to possess the franchise, the right of self-taxation, etc., but for whom is it a benefit? For the citizen, not for the individual.” The distinction he makes here is plain, and Ibsen’s own sympathies are undisguised. The citizen is domesticated man, the agent of existing institutions, who identifies his needs with the needs of the community as determined by the compact majority: Karsten Bernick, Torvald Helmer, Pastor Manders. The individual is revolutionary man, superior to all confining social, political, or moral imperatives, who finds his purpose in the pursuit of his own personal truth: Pastor Brand, Doctor Stockmann, Master Builder Solness. In Ibsen’s mind, these two types are like slave and master, so fundamentally opposed that a victory for one is inevitably a defeat for the other, so that the citizen’s rights are always attained at the cost of the individual’s freedom. Ibsen may possess, in his drama, a highly ambiguous attitude towards his rebel heroes, but on this question there is no doubt where he personally stands: self-realization is the highest value, and if this conflicts with the public welfare, then the public welfare can go hang.²

All his life political parties tried unsuccessfully to claim Ibsen as their own, only to be met with contempt and indifference. And the playwright’s response is perfectly explicable in view of his position of revolt: he is hostile to all movements based on a social conception of man. In Ibsen’s view, the Conservatives merely preserve a corrupted status quo, affirming exhausted traditions and outworn conventions for their own profit, while the Liberals, manipulating a mindless majority, merely palliate an advanced disease with useless nostrums. As for the Radicals, they would only change the shape of the social system, not the fact of it — the Ark he would torpedo is the very State itself. “Now there is absolutely no reasonable necessity for the individual to be a citizen,” he continues in his letter to Brandes. “On the contrary, the state is the curse of the individual. . . . The state must be abolished! In this revolution I will take part!” Such a revolution, of course, could exist only in the fevered fantasies of an Anarchist or a Utopian Marxist, and Ibsen certainly has strong Marxist-Anarchist strains in his nature. But even were such a revolution to become feasible, Ibsen would probably not support it, since it would necessarily become a social revolt rather than the revolt of an individual. Ibsen’s revolt, in short, is so personal that it can find common cause with nothing else in existence. For him, all movements are compromised by their collective goals, for all collectives — not only the State, but community, church, and even family — are the enemies of freedom, infringing on the natural liberties of man.

Considering the extreme radicalism of Ibsen’s beliefs, it is entirely fitting that he should initiate the theatre of revolt; and we shall not confront another modern dramatist whose revolutionary integrity remains quite so pure. It is this revolt that I intend to illustrate in this essay. In a career marked by multiple contradictions in dramatic philosophy, and persistent changes in dramatic form, Ibsen’s turbulent insurgency remains his most important and consistent identifying characteristic from first to last. Ibsen’s personal rebelliousness, as we shall see later, is often checked by a corrective counter-impulse which helps both to discipline and disguise it; but even when his drama finds its most detached and objective form, it still remains the biography of his rebellious spirit. Thus, we shall occasionally find Ibsen’s art taking a social and political direction, especially in his middle period, when the author is concerned with smashing hallowed idols, exposing the lies of modern conventions, and ridiculing the various pieties of the Norwegian community. Yet, it is important to remember always that Ibsen’s revolt is poetic rather than reformist or propagandist, and that even his specifically polemical activities are subordinate to a larger purpose which changes little throughout his dramatic career. The great danger in Ibsen criticism is the tendency to examine his works in isolation from one another, and not — as Ibsen urgently requested — as a continuous, consistent development. When we study this development, we shall be able to confirm his plaintive remark towards the end of his career that “I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than is commonly believed.” We shall also be able to see that Ibsen’s revolt, like that of many great contemporary poets, is total — which is to say, he is dissatisfied with the whole of Creation and not just certain contemporary aspects of it. For Ibsen’s deepest quarrel is probably less with those pillars of church, state, and community who dominate his plays than with the supreme authority figure, God himself. Behind his demand for a new beginning for mankind, one can glimpse his half-hidden desire to fashion a new Creation more in keeping with the logic of his poetic imagination. With this new Creation represented by the body of his art, the basic Ibsenist conflict is frequently messianic — its hero a rebel against God and its issue not superficial changes in the social structure but a complete alteration in the moral nature of man.

Before proceeding to illustrate the strong rebellious strains in Ibsen’s plays, we must pause here to parry a more familiar view of Ibsen, and a more popular interpretation of his work, which are just the opposite of what I have described. For despite the efforts of a generation of excellent critics (Hermann Weigand, Francis Fergusson, Eric Bentley, Janko Lavrin), certain misconceptions continue to cloud our understanding of Ibsen’s underlying purpose, misconceptions fomented by critics who obscure the playwright’s more significant innovations while emphasizing his lesser achievements. Basing their views partly on the external facts of Ibsen’s life, and to a larger extent on misconceptions of his less impressive plays, these critics visualize Ibsen as a bemedaled journeyman-dramatist, equipped with side whiskers, a portly belly, and an impeccable family life, who becomes — after a somewhat unstable youth — one of the most respected and respectable members of the Norwegian community, and is finally buried like a celebrated State official. It is this comfortable burgher whom H. L. Mencken describes, in the preface to the only sizable anthology of Ibsen’s works available for years, as

a highly respected member of the middle class, well-barbered, ease-loving, and careful in mind; a very skilful practitioner of a very exacting and lucrative trade; a safe and sane exponent of order, efficiency, honesty, and common sense . . . [who] believed in all the things that the normal, law-abiding citizen of Christendom believes in, from democracy to romantic love, and from the obligations of duty to the value of virtue, and [who] always gave them the best of it in his plays.

On the basis of this image, Mencken vigorously denies that Ibsen had any mystical side to his nature or any “idiotic symbolism” in his plays, adding that “he gave infinitely more thought to questions of practical dramaturgy — to getting his characters on and off stage, to building up climaxes, to calculating effects — than he ever gave to the ideational content of his dramas.” Though intended as a tribute, this might be the description of any Scribean artificer of liberal, rationalistic persuasion; and it is such half-truths and errors that have now become standard ammunition for attacks on Ibsen by know-nothing journalists.

Ibsen’s early English partisans would never have made him the Philistine that Mencken describes, but, in a way, they contributed the cornerstones for his edifice of misconceptions. To enthusiasts like William Archer, for whom prose realism was the triumphant climax of all Western drama, Ibsen’s greatness consisted largely in his invention of a new dramatic method, based on the French well-made play, which finally banished the aside and the soliloquy from the stage,³ while to Bernard Shaw, the Norwegian’s significance lay in his having introduced social-political discussion into the drama through the agency of a “villain-idealist” and an “unwomanly woman.” This Ibsen — the playwright of realistic dramaturgy, extended ethical debates, and the emancipated woman — may have exhilarated Archer, Shaw, and Mencken, but he alienated innumerable readers and, what is worse, infuriated a whole generation of succeeding dramatists. Some of the most impressive artists in the theatre of revolt, in fact, defined their work in direct opposition to these Ibsenite concepts, while showing scant respect for the master himself. To Strindberg, Ibsen was “that Norwegian bluestocking,” a mere partisan of women’s rights; to Synge, he was only a town artist who imitated reality in “joyless and pallid words”; to Yeats, he was “the chosen author of very clever young journalists”; to Wedekind, he was the breeder of a lethargic menagerie of gray Haustiere (domestic animals); and to Brecht, he was simply an extinct bourgeois: “Very good — for [his] own time and [his] own class.” It is doubtful if the work of any of these dramatists, excluding that of Yeats, would have been the same without the achievements of Ibsen. Yet the popular misconceptions are so firmly established that even these dramatists were unable to see Ibsen’s poetry, vision, and fire.

Actually, the prevalent image of Ibsen has little foundation in fact, for if it is relevant at all (which is doubtful), it is relevant in relation to less than one third of his total work. The emphasis on Ibsen’s prose realism and polemicism dates from the time when the Ibsen controversy was raging at its fiercest, and partisans had to make the master’s plays support his own cause. Yet, the legend stubbornly persists, still continuing to do more harm to Ibsen’s reputation than any other single influence, including the consistently poor production of his plays and the frequent inartistry of Continental, English, and American Ibsenites. It is a legend perpetuated by false emphasis, by isolating certain of Ibsen’s characteristics while ignoring others.⁴ In order to avoid the same errors — and to account for them more fully — let us consider Ibsen’s drama as a creative unity, examining his career as a whole and excluding from our general consideration only those dramas he wrote during his artistic immaturity. We shall seek for the thread which binds his work together, that figure in the carpet which the author himself hinted at, in conversation with Lorentz Dietrichson, when he observed: “People believe that I have changed my views in the course of time. This is a great mistake. My development has, as a matter of fact, been absolutely consistent. I myself can distinctly follow and indicate the thread of its whole course — the unity of my ideas and their gradual development.” When we extricate this thread of thematic consistency, we shall better understand his approach to form; and we shall, I think, discover an artist who was always more a Romantic poet than a prose realist and who never quite managed to suppress his aspiration towards the sublime.

I suggested earlier that Ibsen’s basic material is the expression of rebellion, an element which, however muted, disguised, or repressed, is never completely absent from his work. In its purest form, Ibsen’s rebellion is messianic, expressed through relatively shapeless, expansive, extravagant epics like Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean. But since Ibsen wrote only three masterpieces in this form, it is necessary to demonstrate how Ibsen’s revolt functions in plays more conspicuous for discipline, order, and objectivity. Similarly, though one usually finds the dramatist of revolt suggesting his own sympathies with his rebellious heroes, sometimes through lyrical, enthusiastic, and self-adulatory identification, Ibsen — even in his messianic epics — seems at times peculiarly detached, skeptical, and ironic towards such heroes, when he is not downright hostile to them. And it is necessary to explain why Ibsen sometimes denounces his rebel idealists with as much heat as his Philistines and conformists. Brand, for example, whose identification with God is so strong that it becomes a revolt against God, is punished, with the author’s obvious approval, by celestial vengeance in the form of an avalanche. And Stensgard, the pompous orator of The League of Youth — after revealing that he is guilty of the same presumptuousness (“I tell you the wrath of the Lord is in me. It is His will you are opposing. He has destined me for the light”) — is cruelly ejected from the community as a demagogue and an adventurer.

With the single exception of Doctor Stockmann, in fact, all of Ibsen’s idealists are subject to partial or complete condemnation — a pattern which probably made Shaw conclude that the idealist was Ibsen’s primary villain.⁵ This is a mistake, but there is no denying that Ibsen’s plays yield substantial support for such an interpretation. When a character professes to urge the “claims of the ideal” or to “hold aloft the banner of the ideal,” he is quite frequently dismissed as a hypocrite, a meddler, or a booby. To Ibsen, idealism is sometimes identified with the philosophy of the Devil (an honorific foreign term, as Doctor Relling tells us, for lies), while the rebel is, like Gregers Werle, a self-deceiving blunderer whose energies on behalf of the ideal prove a curse to the average man and a danger to the community.

When we find this fanatical individualist defending the safety of the community — this defiant aristocrat of the will worrying over the happiness of the average man — we know we are on precarious ground and must tread gently. For Ibsen seems to be denying the very terms of his own rebellion which, in its purest form, is dedicated to torpedoing the community and raising the average man to heroic stature. Surely, it is contradictions like this which brought the charge that he had changed his views. Nor are these the only ones. In Brand, Ibsen seems both to approve and disapprove the notion that the rebel must be absolutely true to his calling; in Ghosts, he demonstrates both the importance and futility of advanced opinions; in Rosmersholm, he expresses both hope and despair over the possibility of mankind’s ennoblement from within. In A Doll’s House, he is radical, attacking the marriage built on a lie; in The Wild Duck, he is conservative, showing that domestic falsehoods, under certain conditions, are entirely necessary to survival. He applauds the rebellious Doctor Stockmann for exposing the diseased roots of modern life; he excoriates Stensgard and Gregers Werle for proceeding to the same goal. It is a commonplace of Ibsen criticism that the playwright will often advance a doctrine in one play with heated conviction, only to retract it, with equal conviction, in the next. And the abundance of unsynthesized theses and antitheses in his drama — purpose versus compromise; freedom versus necessity; age versus youth; duty versus the joy of life; truth versus illusion; reality versus ideals; work versus love; emancipation versus guilt; compassion versus severity — has been the frustration and despair of every doctrinaire Ibsenite. If Ibsen is a systematic rebel, then he is a peculiarly evasive one; and anyone seeking philosophical certainty or ideological consistency in his works had better beware.

Yet, despite the author’s omnipresent ambiguity, complexity, and elusiveness, a kind of consistency can be adduced if we look below the surface of action and statement to Ibsen’s particularized rebellion. To do this, however, we must first understand his method of creation, noting the strong subjective element (an infallible sign of the Romantic temperament) imbedded in each of his plays, and providing both their literary motive and material. It is surprising that this element has not been more remarked upon, since Ibsen left so many hints about its existence. In a verse written in 1877, for example, he writes (after defining life as a battle with internal trolls), “To write poetry means to hold/A judgment day over oneself.” This seems to be an open admission that for Ibsen, the very process of creation was a form of self-examination proceeding from an inner struggle of conscience. In a letter, he later confirmed this in somewhat different terms: “Everything I have written has the closest possible relationship with what I have lived through, even if that has not been my personal — or actual — experience,” adding, in another note, that the artist “must be extremely careful in discriminating between what one has observed and what one has experienced, because only this last can be the theme for creative work.”

Experience, then, was the taproot for Ibsen’s themes and characters — but experience of a very special kind. Rejecting that “personal — or actual — experience,” which was connected with the outward events of his own life (unlike Strindberg, Ibsen very rarely exploited his personal biography in his plays), Ibsen was inspired instead by the experience of his inner life, the forces molding his intellectual, emotional and spiritual development. It was through analyzing this inner life, by probing his buried self for faults and virtues and exposing his own character to ruthless examination and criticism, that Ibsen drew the outlines for all his major rebels. This technique of character creation can be clearly detected in Ibsen’s epic period where his Romanticism is most feverish and his identification with his plays is less successfully disguised; and when Ibsen writes his epic works, he is not reluctant to admit his close relationship with his central characters. “Brand is myself in my best moments,” he writes in 1870, “just as it is certain that by self-analysis I brought to light many of both Peer Gynt’s and Stensgard’s qualities.” Self-analysis, it should be noted, also brought to light the undisguised messianism of Ibsen’s Emperor Julian: in this rebellious figure, he observes, “as in most of what I have written in my riper years, there is more of my inner life than I care to acknowledge to the public.” Ibsen’s identification with his rebel heroes, however, is not confined to his epic period. Even after he switches to the realistic mode with its more objective emphasis, he continues to employ this method, though it is less obvious in his first two or three prose plays. He considers himself less “muddleheaded” than Doctor Stockmann but admits that they “agree on many things”; he calls Solness, the renegade master builder, a figure “somewhat related to me”; and we do not need the author’s testimony to see his resemblance to characters like Rosmer, Borkman, Allmers, and Rubek, the rebellious personae of his last, openly autobiographical plays.

Considering his willingness to share the character of a blackguard like Stensgard, in fact, I think we may even go so far as to suggest that Gregers Werle, the prince of villain-idealists, is a satirical portrait of the artist as well. For while we must be careful not to press these identifications too hard, it is probable that many Ibsen characters — superficially modeled on contemporary figures or general social types — are actually closer to Ibsen’s concept of himself than is immediately apparent. What I am trying to suggest is that Ibsen’s conflicting attitudes towards similar characters in two different plays, or towards a single character in the same play, are a product of his marked ambivalence towards himself. Yielding to the pull of this ambivalence, Ibsen swings like a pendulum from egoism to humility, from self-exaltation to self-hatred, sometimes unfettering himself, sometimes disciplining himself through the medium of art. Ibsen’s apparent contradictions, then, are merely the results of certain dialectical stresses within his own character. His attacks on idealism reflect his temporary ironic feelings towards his own idealism; his strictness towards moralists is the severity of a confirmed moralist; his satire on the rebel figure is an attempt to punish the rebel in himself.

The same thing applies to Ibsen’s changing attitudes towards his themes. For while Ibsen’s plays may occasionally conclude with an appearance of intellectual certainty, the artist himself is always floundering in doubts and ambiguities. Ibsen is the victim of warring antinomies with which he struggles without cease throughout the whole of his career. Temperamentally disinclined towards the moderate center, where contraries are often resolved, Ibsen examines first one extreme position, then its opposite, toying with dogmas but always forced into an undogmatic dualism. Ibsen, then, is an idealist whose ideals cannot be systematized from his plays. But this lack of system, on the other hand, is merely the inevitable, though paradoxical, result of his peculiar rebelliousness. Singlemindedly devoted to truth, often at the expense of beauty, Ibsen has no illusions about the permanence of truth; for him, all intellectual postulates, no matter how persuasive, are invariably reduced to lifeless conventions in time. For Ibsen, therefore, the ultimate Truth lies only in the perpetual conflict of truths, and even the rebel must be careful not to institutionalize his revolt. Thus, the real quintessence of Ibsenism is total resistance to whatever is established, for his anarchistic iconoclasm extends not only to the current conventions of his time, but even to his own current beliefs and convictions. Unable to challenge any position without anatomizing its equally valid (or equally invalid) opposite,⁶ Ibsen emerges as the champion of no ideology other than the ideology of the negative assault. On the contrary (Tvertimot) — the words on his lips when he died — might very well be the epitaph to his total dramatic work.

All of Ibsen’s drama is the product of this ambivalence, precariously balanced between the author’s involvement and detachment, between the subjective and the objective, the ethical and the aesthetic, the rebellious and the controlled. This ambivalence provides each of his plays with a double level, in which a drama of ideas coexists with a drama of action, so that Ibsen’s characters, functioning both in thought and deed, have a rich intellectual life in addition to their dramatic existence. The drama of ideas is generally the expression of Ibsen’s personal rebellion, while the drama of action puts this rebellion into some kind of objective perspective. For while Ibsen will often use a character to advance some rebellious doctrine which he probably holds himself, he is almost never satisfied with mere ventriloquism. At the same time that he advances an abstract idea, he examines the consequences of this idea in the arena of human action, demonstrating both the theoretical power of certain truths and their baleful effect on the lives of others when put into practice. At his best, then, Ibsen will treat the drama of ideas and the drama of action as two contiguous developments which touch and enrich each other throughout the play, deriving his energy, drive, and excitement from the one, and his detachment, complexity, and thickness from the other. At his worst, Ibsen’s manipulation of the strings is unsure or clumsy, so that his endings sometimes seem equivocal or his characters inconsistent: In A Doll’s House, for example, Nora’s abrupt conversion from a protected, almost infantile dependent into an articulate and determined spokesman for individual freedom may serve the drama of ideas but it is totally unconvincing in the drama of action. But when Ibsen perfects this method, it becomes one of his most original contributions to the modern theatre, endowing his work with a double-leveled perspective which cannot be matched by any other modern playwright.

Ibsen, then, is a Romantic rebel with a Classical alter ego which restrains his headier impulses towards total liberation, self-expression, and moral idealism by inhibiting his freedom, restricting his rebellion, and testing his ideals in the world of accommodation and compromise. We have already seen how Ibsen’s self-imposed discipline results in certain vertical conflicts within the individual plays. It can be seen, from another angle, in the horizontal development of his art and his changing concepts of dramatic form. The progression of Ibsen’s career, in fact, is as dialectical as any of his plays. Works like Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean, are relatively overt expressions of the author’s early Romanticism in which he creates an architecture of poetry and metaphysics out of huge, irregular blocks of stone. But beginning with The League of Youth, and continuing through his “modern” phase (an eleven-year period, ending with Hedda Gabler in 1890), Ibsen suppresses his Romanticism — along with his poetry, his mysticism, and his concern with man in nature — to satisfy a pull towards prose, objective reality, and the problems of modern civilization. This Classical counterrhythm gives one the impression that Ibsen’s art has been totally transformed. The rebel against God is domesticated into a rebel against society; the scene focusses on the collective as well as on the individual; the humanistic medical doctor becomes an important character, as Darwinist notions of heredity and environment begin to impinge on the action; the language becomes more thin and chastened; the characterization more specific; the themes more contemporary; and the entire drama takes on, first, that manipulated quality we remember from the well-made play, then, that precision of form we associate with Sophoclean tragedy. Actually, Ibsen’s art has changed much less radically than is first apparent, for, in his realistic plays, he has merely contained his rebellious spirit within a new form. As if to prove that this spirit has remained unsullied, Ibsen returns, in his last great plays, to his early prophetic, autobiographical, and metaphysical concerns, dramatizing them in a way which combines the Romantic freedom of his youth with the Classical restraint of his middle years. To trace Ibsen’s artistic development in more precise detail, let us examine works from each of his three major periods, discussing them in relation to the personal circumstances under which they were written.

Any discussion of Ibsen’s mature art must start with Brand, since this monolithic masterpiece is not only the first play he completed after leaving his native country, but his first, and possibly his greatest, work of enduring power. Nothing in Ibsen’s previous writings prepares us for a play of this scope, not even the substantial talent he displays in The Vikings at Helgeland and The Pretenders, for Brand is like a sudden revelation from the depths of an original mind. It is highly probable that Ibsen’s achievement in Brand was intimately connected with his departure from Norway, for he seemed to find an important source of creative power in his self-imposed exile: “I had to escape the swinishness up there to feel fully cleansed,” he wrote to his mother-in-law from Rome. “I could never lead a consistent spiritual life there. I was one man in my work and another outside — and for that reason my work failed in consistency too.” Ibsen’s desire for creative consistency was certainly fulfilled during his sojourn in Rome. Besides filling him with admiration for the “indescribable harmony” of his new surroundings (“beautiful, wonderful, magical,” he called them), Ibsen’s Italienische Reise, like Goethe’s before him, seems to have opened him up to an expansive Romanticism. Ibsen himself was quite conscious of the influence of Rome on his art, for in describing to a friend how Brand had come to be written, he said: “Add to this Rome with its ideal peace, association with the carefree artist community, an existence in an atmosphere which can only be compared with that of Shakespeare’s As You Like It — and you have the conditions productive of Brand.” It was a period of the most exquisite freedom Ibsen had ever known, and his nostalgia for these years was later to find expression in Oswald’s enthusiastic descriptions of the buoyant livsglaede (joy of life) to be found in the Paris artist community.

On the surface, Brand — an epic of snow and ice with a glacial Northern atmosphere and a forbidding central figure — would seem to have little in common with this warm, sunny Italian world. Yet the sense of abandon which Ibsen was experiencing is reflected in the play’s openness of form and richness of inspiration (“May I not . . . point to Brand and Peer Gynt,” wrote Ibsen later, “and say: ‘See, the wine cup has done this!’ ”). Though it was originally conceived as a narrative poem, Ibsen soon reworked Brand into a five-act poetic drama, a work so conscientiously long and unstageable that Ibsen was astonished when a Scandinavian company decided to produce it. For Ibsen, exulting in the luxury of pure self-expression, had written the work unmindful of the limiting demands of an audience or the restricting requirements of a theatre. Having finally freed his imagination from its frozen Northern vaults, Ibsen had at last discovered how to make his work an integral part of his spiritual life. The solution was simple enough; he had to be the same person in his work as outside it. Although in The Pretenders Ibsen had dramatized the conflicts in his own soul through a fictional external action, Brand was the most thoroughgoing revelation of his rebellious interior life that Ibsen had yet attempted, an act of total purgation, in which he exorcised the troll battle within his heart and mind by transforming it into art.⁷ With Brand, Ibsen confronted for the first time and in combination the great subjects which were to occupy him successively during the course of his career: the state of man in the universe, the state of modern society, and the state of his own feverish, divided soul.

The play, a storage house for all of Ibsen’s future themes and conflicts, is constructed like a series of interlocking arches, each ascending higher than the last. The lowest arch is a domestic drama, in which Ibsen examines the relationship of the idealist to his family (the basis for later plays like The Wild Duck); the middle arch is a social-political drama, in which he analyzes the effect of the aristocratic individual on a democratic community (the basis for plays like An Enemy of the People); and the highest arch is a religious drama, in which he shows the rivalry between the messianic rebel and the nineteenth-century God (the basis for plays like The Master Builder). Pastor Brand — a reforming minister of extraordinary zeal (his very name means “sword and fire”) — is the hero of all. three dramas, and Ibsen’s supreme idealist, individualist, and rebel. In the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, and those apostles of religious purification who arise in human history to change the course of the world, Brand is remorselessly dedicated to his cause. Like Luther, he has elected to be the “chastiser of the age,” scourging the excesses of individuals and institutions; like Moses, he is determined to bring new codes of spiritual purity to a generation of idlers, appeasers, and dreamers; and like Christ, he is committed to the salvation of all mankind through a complete transformation of human character. Brand, however, is a very peculiar Christian, if indeed he can be called Christian at all. Intensely masculine, patristic, strict, and unyielding, he rejects the compassionate side of Christianity in his determination to close the gap between what is and what should be by making human practice conform to spiritual ideals. Actually, Brand is more extreme than the most apocalyptic Puritan reformers, a Savonarola of the will who brings Protestant individualism to the furthest reaches of its own implications. For, as Brand develops his theology, he demands not only that each man become his own Church, but — so strict are the extremes of his ideal — even his own God.

Man becomes a god by imitating God, but Brand’s God — not a “gentle wind” but a “storm” — is almost inimitable, being the purest and most uncompromising of celestial beings. He is identified with the Ideal itself, to be attained through the unlimited striving of the human will. Because of his emphasis on will, the mortal sin for Brand is cowardice and half-heartedness. Like Kierkegaard before him, and Nietzsche after,⁸ Brand is disposed towards the great saint or the great sinner — the man who lives his life extremely with a purpose either good or evil — but he cannot abide the will-less mediocrities who fail to be anything fully. Brand’s Devil, therefore, is the spirit of compromise, while his concept of evil is identified with the middle way of moderation, accommodation, luxury, ease, and moral laziness. Taking “All or nothing” as his rebellious credo, he has resolved to make “heirs of heaven” out of the dull and cloddish inhabitants of the modern world, fashioning a new race of heroes to match the heroic figures of the past.

Brand, who follows his own precepts with uncompromising integrity, is himself one of these heroes — but at a terrific cost. Struggling painfully to conquer any emotions which might lead him from the path of righteousness, he becomes contemptuous of any but the hardest virtues: for him, love is merely a smirch of lies (“Faced by a generation/ Which is lax and slothful, the best love is hate”),⁹ while charity and humanitarianism are the encouragement of human weakness (“Was God humane when Jesus died?”). Thus, Brand finally succeeds in suppressing his own human feelings, an ambiguous victory which makes him at the same time both wholly admirable and wholly impossible. Like most monastic, disciplinary types, he has something forbidding and inhuman in his nature. Ibsen usually associates him with images of cold and hardness (snow, steel, iron, stone); even the conditions of his birth (he was “born by a cold fjord in the shadow of a barren mountain”) suggest his icelike qualities. By comparison, the beauty-loving painter Ejnar and his lovely fiancée Agnes are identified with “mountain air, the sunshine, the dew, and the scent of pines,” and their pursuit of Southern pleasures is a striking contrast to Brand’s singleminded pursuit of the ideal.

Yet, such is Brand’s heroic stature, fierce courage, and charismatic power that by the end of Act II Agnes has been converted to his religion of “grayness,” leaving Ejnar to take up her duties by Brand’s side. It is in the domestic scenes that follow (Acts III and IV) that Brand’s defective humanity is most strongly dramatized, for his fanatic ideals of moral purity succeed in destroying his entire family; first his mother, who dies unshriven when Brand refuses to visit her unless she freely gives away her fortune; then his young son Alf, a victim of the Northern cold who has been refused the Southern warmth (an Ibsenist image for love); and finally Agnes herself, forced into dreadful choices and ultimately deprived of even the relics of her mother love. All this while, Brand has been engaged in a terrific struggle with himself, torn between his ideal and his love for Agnes and Alf. Yet his decision to be a god has left him with no real choice; and when Agnes warns him “He dies who sees Jehovah face to face,” he can only accept the terrible implications of his Godhead and let her die. When she abdicates her painful life with an ecstatic cry (“I am free, Brand! I am free!”), Brand has achieved a moral victory only through the sacrifice of everything he loved in the world — as Shaw put it, through “having caused more intense suffering by his saintliness than the most talented sinner could possibly have done with twice his opportunities.”

Yet it is only in the domestic portions of the play that Brand emerges as a villain-idealist; like all great reformers (even Christ treated his family with scant respect), he has no time or capacity for a happy private life. When he plays a public role, in the social-political scenes, he is a bright contrast to the citizenry he has come to reform. Here, Brand, a typical Sturm-und-Drang hero, is the individual at war with society, denouncing its worm-eaten conventions, its limited aspirations, its corrupt institutions. His antagonist, in this drama, is the Mayor, society’s elected representative — like Mayor Peter Stockmann and Peter Mortensgard, a “typical man of the people,” and therefore Brand’s instinctive enemy. The conflict between them arises from their conflicting expectations from their constituents. Brand, appealing to spiritual man, seeks the salvation of the individual through a revolution in his moral consciousness; the Mayor, appealing to social man, seeks the pacification of the community through attention to its material needs. Wishing to make life easier, the Mayor wants to construct public buildings; Brand, wishing to make life harder, wants to construct a new Church. This conflict — in which Brand obviously expresses Ibsen’s own predisposition in favor of the individual against the community, the moral against the social, the spiritual against the material, radical revolution against moderation and compromise — is ultimately irreconcilable. But since Brand’s following has increased, the Mayor, pulling his sheets to the wind, capitulates, following the desires of the compact majority by helping Brand with his plans. The Mayor, however, has not lost the battle. He has merely made a strategic retreat in order to assimilate his enemy. And, as for Brand, his temporary success has made him unwittingly betray his own ideal.

In Act V, which forms the climax of the religious drama and the heart of the play, Brand becomes what Ibsen really intended him to be — neither a villain-idealist nor a hero-reformer but a tragic sufferer existing independently of moral judgments. At the beginning of the act, Brand is seen as a fashionable preacher, a popular commercial personality like Billy Graham. His new Church is about to open and Brand himself is to be decorated by the State for his services to the community. Multitudes have gathered for the event — vaguely sensing that the destruction of the old Church was some form of sacrilege and trembling with apprehension “as though they had been summoned to elect a new God.” Brand himself is very morose; he cannot pray and his soul is full of discords. His mood grows blacker when the Provost — the theological counterpart of the Mayor — begins to inform him that religion is merely an instrument of the State to insure itself against unrest. When he warns Brand to concern himself with the needs of the community rather than the salvation of the individual, Brand suddenly becomes aware that the Church is a lie and that he has become a corrupt institution himself. Ignoring the Provost’s contention that “the man who fights alone will never achieve anything of a lasting nature,” he tells his enthusiastic followers that the only true Church is the wild and natural world of the fjords and moorlands, not yet tainted by human compromise, hypocrisy, and evil: “God is not here!/ His kingdom is perfect freedom.”¹⁰

Like Moses leading his people towards the beautiful promised land, Brand makes his way upwards to the freedom and purity of the cliffs and mountains. But like Moses’ followers, the people begin to slacken and grumble when the way grows hard. The Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, had told the resurrected Christ that the common man seeks not Godhead, but miracle, mystery, and authority. And now it is Brand’s turn to learn of human limitation, as his followers clamor for water, bread, prophecies, security, and miracles in place of the spiritual victory he promises. When he offers them no more than “a new will,” “a new faith,” and “a crown of thorns,” they feel betrayed and begin to stone their Messiah. And when the Mayor arrives with the Provost to reclaim the sheeplike flock with a promise of food and safety, they repudiate Brand’s salvation altogether, meekly returning to their secular lives below.

Brand is left alone on the moorlands, torn and bleeding, to meditate upon his mistakes. In putting vengeance, justice, and retribution before forgiveness, charity, and compassion; in repudiating the “God of every dull and earthbound slave,” Brand has pursued Godhead through the pursuit of an incorruptible ideal. But while making him Godlike, this quest has also made him a rebel against the very Deity he had tried to serve. Brand’s messianism has turned him into something harder and crueler than God, and it has broken the backs of his all-too-human followers. Now Brand must learn that man cannot be God; that he must live with the Devil if he is to live at all; and that even the freedom of the will is limited by the inexorable determinism of inherited sin.¹¹ Now, like Moses on Mount Nebo, Brand is denied the promised land, and must await retribution himself. Yet, still he adheres to his ideal. When a specter appears, in the shape of Agnes, offering him warmth, love, and forgiveness if he will only renounce the awful words “All or nothing,” Brand refuses; and when the spirit is transformed into a hawk flying across the moorlands, Brand recognizes his ancient enemy, the Devil of Compromise.

Still struggling upwards, Brand finally reaches the Ice Church, a mighty chasm between peaks and summits where “cataract and avalanche sing Mass.” It is Brand’s true parish, for there, in the ideal habitat of the extreme Romantic, Brand may preach his gospel of the absolute, free from the human world and its compromising influences. When Gerd — the wild gypsy girl who has accompanied him — suddenly has a half-ironic, half-sincere vision of Brand as the incarnation of Christ and begins worshiping him as a God, Brand, at last, gives way to human feeling:

Until today I sought to be a tablet
On which God could write. Now my life
Shall flow rich and warm. The mist is breaking.
I can weep! I can kneel! I can pray!

But it is too late. Shooting at the devil-hawk with her rifle, Gerd has started an avalanche, and Brand is about to be buried in the snow. At the last minute, Brand asks a final tortured question of God: “If not by Will, how can man be redeemed?” And the answer comes from the heavens in booming tones: Han er deus caritatis — “He is the God of charity, mercy, love.”

It is an answer which completes the play, but denies its philosophical basis. For if Brand’s severe demands have all been wrong, and man is redeemed only through love, then the whole intellectual structure of the work collapses; and Brand’s relentless attacks on compromise and accommodation are all superfluous. We must remember, however, that Ibsen is not rejecting Brand’s revolt as an idea; he is merely rejecting it as a form of action. And since Brand’s judge is a God of love, even Brand, we must assume, is forgiven at the last. The ending of Brand, nevertheless, like the ending of so many of Ibsen’s plays, is inconclusive, an early example of Ibsen’s failure to integrate his drama of ideas with his drama of action — and this itself is the result of his refusal to adopt a positive synthetic doctrine. Up until the ending, we can regard Brand both as a great hero-saint-reformer with a redeeming message of salvation and as a flawed, repressed, and ice-cold being whose ruthless dedication to an impossible ideal causes untold suffering and needless deaths. Up until the ending, we can admire Ibsen’s extraordinary capacity for keeping two antithetical attitudes in his mind at the same time, so that he is able to exalt messianic rebellion as an idea, while condemning it in practice. But the ending demands a synthesis which the author cannot provide; instead, he chooses to invalidate the intellectual hypothesis of his play. Still, even in this vaguely unsatisfying ending, one is filled with admiration for this defeated, yet triumphantly Godlike hero, whose eternal struggle upwards has somehow enlarged the spiritual boundaries of man.

We must conclude, then, that both the success and failure of the play stem from the unreconciled conflicts of the playwright. For Ibsen’s split attitude towards his hero reflects the clash in his own soul between the twin poles of his temperament — the Romantic idealism of the reforming rebel and the Classical detachment of the objective artist. This dualism — fatal to a man of action but invaluable to a dramatist — is present whenever Ibsen examines the effect of absolute idealism on private happiness, a subject that is to obsess him all his life. But though he will treat this delicate theme again and again in the future, he will never make a presentation of such compelling power and grandeur.

Brand introduced Ibsen into worldwide fame; and exhilarated by his success, he decided to have another try at the episodic poetic play with Peer Gynt. If Brand’s character reflects Ibsen in his best moments (which is to say, at his most morally elevated), then Peer’s reflects Ibsen in his most irresponsible moments (which is to say, at his most morally lax); yet, it is Peer who charms and ingratiates. It is likely that Ibsen, after punishing his own fanatical idealism, is here trying to discipline the more permissive side of his nature, the seeker after pleasure in the Italian sun. The play — with its folk quality, its satirical touches, and its occasionally tropical atmosphere — would seem to be the very obverse of Brand. Actually, it is a dramatization of the same themes, treated from a comic-ironic angle. Peer, the embodiment of modern compromise, hypocrisy, irresponsibility, and self-delusion, is very much like those feckless citizens whom Brand had come to reform. And while the play has no rebel or idealist to urge him towards the heights, the playwright himself acts in this capacity, assuming the function of Brand and exposing the extent to which Peer falls short of the ideal. Ibsen is here working out the negative technique he will use in most of his realistic plays, in which not the rebel but the characters rebelled against move to the foreground of the action.

Ibsen is also working out the various implications of nineteenth-century selfhood, a subject he had barely probed in Brand. What does it mean to realize yourself? What self represents the true individual? The Hegelian distinction that Ibsen draws in Peer Gynt is between character and personality, the one defined by a person’s inner reality, the other by the mask he shows to the world. Peer’s much-vaunted self, being merely a capricious and unstable public face, suggests he has personality without character, ego without identity. Peer, therefore, emerges as the essential opportunist. Infected with the disease of halfness, he is always prepared to adapt himself to circumstances; and dedicated to pure appearance, he must find beauty in ugliness, courage in cowardice, truth in illusion, nourishment in excrement. Thus, the climax of the drama occurs in the madhouse scene. There Peer unwittingly discovers his most appropriate Kingdom of Self, for there illusion reigns supreme, madness being the triumph of the ego over external reality.

Peer’s life, then, has been a tragedy of waste. Unlike the average man, Peer began with a strong potential; he might have been “a shiny button on the coat of the world” — possibly an artist, considering his gifts for fantasy. But he chose to be neither a great saint nor a great sinner, only an opportunistic mediocrity. Now, buried under lost opportunities, he is marked for retribution, destined for the Button Molder’s ladle. Yet, Ibsen — remembering the lesson he had forced on Brand — turns compassionate at the end, and gives Peer one last chance for salvation. In the “tranquil love” of Solveig,¹² Peer’s self has been preserved. And now, aware that “to be yourself you must slay yourself,” he prepares to redeem his soul by a self-sacrificial dedication to some calling higher than his own immediate pleasure or advancement. Presumably, the Button Molder will decide, at the last crossroad, whether Peer has succeeded in his task without sacrificing the happiness of those around him — a dilemma which Brand had totally failed to solve.

It was a dilemma that Ibsen now prepared to face in his own artistic life, for he had decided to go the way of Brand and Peer Gynt, suppressing his own personal pleasures for the sake of supreme dedication to his calling. The immediate result of this momentous decision was his move from Rome to Dresden in 1869; soon after came a more tangible result, The League of Youth. In this clumsy play about political maneuvering in a southern Norwegian town, Ibsen’s decision to embark on a radically new career is immediately apparent. It is a work without a single line of verse — without a trace of poetic feeling — concerned with the details and problems of contemporary life, and corseted in a tight five-act structure which recalls the well-made play. Despite its inartistry and banality, The League of Youth is, in many ways, quite typical of the new phase of Ibsen’s art. In later years, he is to find another form of expression for his poetic impulses, but verse is gone forever.¹³ Gone too is the extravagant sweep of his poetic masterpieces, and their self-expressive freedom. Ibsen has entered a period of extreme self-denial, which is even signified — considering his affection for Italy and general distaste for the Germans — by his move to Dresden. But it is German order, clarity, and restraint, rather than Italian ebullience, warmth, and intoxication which have now become essential to his art.

Before suppressing his Romanticism completely, however, Ibsen publishes his last great messianic epic, Emperor and Galilean, which finally appears in 1873, nine years after it was begun in Rome. This monumental double drama in ten acts is obviously designed as Ibsen’s philosophical testament: “The positive world-philosophy which critics have so long demanded from me,” he writes, “they will find here.” In trying to resolve his own contradictions and assume an affirmative posture, Ibsen borrows freely from Hegel. The play even has a Hegelian subtitle: “A World-Historical Drama” — and Hegel’s pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is the pattern of its thematic development. While Ibsen’s thesis and antithesis are brilliantly conceived and interpreted, however, his synthesis is much too cloudy to qualify as a “positive world-philosophy.” Even when he wants to, Ibsen cannot codify his revolt, and his contradictions remain unresolved. Nevertheless, Ibsen was inordinately fond of this play, and thought it his masterpiece. Written in a luminous prose, modeled on the synoptic gospels, and informed by a strange visionary power, it is offered as a prophetic book for the world of the future.

Ibsen’s hero, with whom he is quick to admit his affinities, is the fourth-century Roman Emperor Julian — called the Apostate because of his efforts to overthrow the state religion of Christianity. In the first part of the play, “Caesar’s Apostasy,” Ibsen traces the early career of Julian, characterized as a disenchanted youth, ardently tasting all varieties of religious experience in a quest after beauty and truth. None of the pagan doctrines satisfy him, however, and, after rejecting them all, he is finally drawn to a Dionysian seer from Ephesus called Maximus the Mystic, who becomes his spiritual adviser for the rest of his life. Julian vacillates between the conflicting empires of Caesar and Christ, the conflicting claims of flesh and spirit, the conflicting demands of freedom and necessity, the conflicting values of self-realization and self-abnegation — both Peer Gynt and Brand inhabit his soul and tear him apart. Julian tries to resolve his conflicts by consulting the supernatural; and, with the aid of Maximus, he visits a symposium of spirits, hoping to find the path to his salvation.

During this seance, Julian sees apparitions of “three great freedmen under necessity”: Cain, Judas, and one “who is not yet among the shades.” This last visitor, we later learn, is called “Messiah,” an Emperor-God who is both ruler and redeemer — “Emperor in the kingdom of the spirit — and god in that of the flesh.” Julian immediately assumes this Messiah to be himself, and, filled with messianic fervor, he determines to found the Third Empire of which the oracle goes on to speak — an empire to be achieved only through the mystical exercise of the will. Like the Messiah, the Third Empire is a synthesis of two opposing claims. “Founded on the tree of knowledge and the tree of the cross together, because it hates and loves them both,” it will combine “Logos in Pan — and Pan in Logos,” fleshly joy and the spiritual word. This paradox is never adequately explained — but one thing about Ibsen’s vision of the future is certain: “In that empire, the present watchword of revolt will be realized.”

In The Emperor Julian, the second part of the drama, Ibsen reveals Julian to be a false Messiah. Having misunderstood the oracle and pursued his will-to-power, Julian is persecuting Christians and declaring himself the only God, at the same time reviving the rites of Apollo and Dionysus. Julian’s apostasy, and his war against Christ, however, have only strengthened Christianity: miracles are once again abounding, and the faithful are embracing martyrdom with the old joy. Julian even helps, unwittingly, to fulfill an ancient Christian prophecy when, having rebuilt the temple of Apollo, which Christ once threatened to destroy, he sees it annihilated by a whirlwind. Cursed by the bishops, resisted by the people, Julian is learning what has hitherto been obscure: “Jesus Christ was the greatest rebel that ever lived. . . . He lives in the rebellious minds of men; he lives in their scorn and defiance of all visible authority.”¹⁴

Maximus had prophesied to Julian: “Both Emperor and Galilean shall succumb” — but he did not mean that either would perish. Rather, Caesar and Christ would both be assimilated in the new Messiah, as a child succumbs to the youth and the youth to the man. Now, Julian must pay for his misreading of Maximus’s prophecy. After attempting, and failing, to establish his Godhead by conquering the world, Julian is finally wounded in Persia. And like a later Ibsen hero (Solness in The Master Builder) who will also attempt the “impossible,” Julian dies to the accompaniment of “singing in the air.” Maximus speaks his epitaph. Julian had been misled — like Cain and Judas — by a prodigal God who is spendthrift of souls; but his death has moved mankind closer to its goal. Although Julian was not, as Maximus had thought, the mediator between the two empires, nevertheless Maximus is certain that “The third empire shall come! The spirit of man shall once more enter into its heritage — and then shall the smoke of incense arise to thee, and to thy two guests in the symposium.” Men still await “the Mighty One” — “self-begotten in the man who wills” — the Messiah who will turn them into gods on earth.

Emperor and Galilean contains many stunning dramatic passages, as well as being an extraordinary anticipation of Nietzsche’s later attitudes towards Christianity, Dionysus, and the Superman. But the play does not succeed in formulating that “positive world-philosophy” that the author promised: the Third Empire remains a vague and misty dream. Nevertheless, Emperor and Galilean is a fine illustration of Ibsen’s messianic demands, and the religious strain which always lies at the bottom of his thought. Furthermore, in the conflicting empires of Caesar and Christ, Ibsen has embodied his own irreconcilable conflicts — between flesh and spirit, free will and necessity, realism and idealism — contradictions which will always be present, in one way or another, in his mind. In a speech made in Stockholm in 1887, Ibsen said:

I have been charged on various occasions with being a pessimist. And that is what I am, in so far as I do not believe in the absoluteness of human ideals. But I am at the same time an optimist in so far as I believe fully and steadfastly in the ability of ideals to propagate and develop. Particularly and specifically do I believe that the ideals of our age, in passing away, are tending towards that which in my drama Emperor and Galilean I have tentatively called the Third Empire.

The rest of his plays still strive, however quietly, to bring that messianic dream about.

But after Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen has finished with the messianic drama. Having cast his lot with “the art of the future,” he has decided to create not sprawling epics about man on the top of the world but rather well-constructed realistic prose works about man in the depths of the community. Accompanying this discovery is his conversion to the Classical objective mode. It is the presentation of modern life that now concerns him, a subject for which the poetic Romanticism of his youth is inappropriate; and so he purposely limits his resources, developing a chastened and disciplined style. Whatever the ultimate rewards of this decision, the immediate sacrifices must have been tremendous. For Ibsen has decided to give up the natural settings of the fjords and mountains for the cluttered appointments of decorated drawing rooms; the religious-philosophical drama for the drama of everyday life; the unrestricted freedom of epic heroes for the petty limitations of contemporary husbands and housewives; the soaring image and suggestive metaphor for flat conversations in the parlor over cigars and Tokay. Since it took Ibsen some time to master the new experimental forms, his repudiation of the confident techniques of his youth must have filled him with uncertainty and apprehension. But although he regretted his decision for the rest of his life (his last plays ache with his remorse), he never once turned back to the epic poetic form. Probably remembering his own aphorism, he had determined to slay himself in order to become himself, killing his Romantic desire for self-expression for the sake of a selfless seeking after truth.

It is undoubtedly one of the most heroic decisions in the whole of modern art, the act of a man who was clearly — to use Edmund Wilson’s striking phrase about Mallarmé — “a true saint of literature.” Yet, despite his desire for a more rigorously detached attitude towards his art, Ibsen’s conversion to Classicism was far from absolute, and his desire for objectivity was never quite fulfilled. Formally, there is no question that Ibsen’s art has changed; and he is extremely preoccupied, during this period, with the careful organization of “reality.” But it must be emphasized that Ibsen was attracted to realism for highly unconventional reasons — not because it afforded the dramatist an opportunity to document the surface of life, but because it permitted him to penetrate that surface to the hidden truth beneath. It is, in short, Ibsen’s revolt — his desire to probe the appearance of things to expose the true motives of mankind — that distinguishes him from many of his lesser contemporaries and followers, most of whom were either pamphleteers or photographers. In this period, Ibsen’s spleen is aroused principally by modern hypocrisy — the gap between what is and what should be, the distance between what is practiced and what is affirmed — and his assaults are aimed at the lies that form the basis of modern institutions. In short, while Ibsen’s formal approach has changed, his themes remain substantially the same; and while his style is now more objective, his drama remains essentially the history of his revolt.

Ibsen’s prose realism, then, is primarily a new surface manner beneath which the old thematic obsessions still obtrude. In transforming his art, Ibsen has not been able to destroy his Romantic rebellion; he has simply found another way to express it. He has turned his attention to the life of the community not to affirm it but to scourge and purify it,¹⁵ vindicating the rights of the individual against its compromising claims; and he has adapted the language of prose in order to discover a modern stage poetry, expressible through means other than speech. Even now, Ibsen’s art is far from fixed. From this point on, he will be restlessly experimenting, developing, evolving — trying to create a form which will satisfy both sides of his dualistic nature. Since his rebellion is now more disciplined and controlled by form, Ibsen’s art no longer expresses his emotional life so freely. But his aspiration towards the ideal continues unabated. Even when the bourgeois upholstery is piled up to the windows, Ibsen’s beloved fjords — the symbols of Romantic freedom — can still be glimpsed outside. Though he proceeds now by different and more circuitous routes, he is always trying to find his way back up the mountains to the pure, free air above.

In Ghosts, the culminating work of Ibsen’s “realistic” period, the fjords and mountains are out of reach, but they can just be seen through the conservatory windows, providing a healthy contrast to the fetid atmosphere within. With Ghosts, Ibsen has at last gained control over his new drama, after the experimental bungles of The League of Youth, Pillars of Society, and A Doll’s House, for he has finally achieved a perfect wedding of form and subject matter. His success is the result of substantial technical experimentation; after careful study of the Greeks, he has junked the techniques of the well-made play¹⁶ in favor of the more integrated structure of Sophoclean tragedy. As a result, one is no longer bothered by the noise of Scribean machinery in the wings. Plotted without sensational reversals and unconvincing conversions, Ghosts contains no surprise marriages (as in The League of Youth), no death ships prevented from sailing at the last minute (as in Pillars of Society), no incriminating letters rattling around in the mailbox (as in A Doll’s House). Instead, as Francis Fergusson has observed, the work is constructed on the pattern of Oedipus, beginning at a point right before the catastrophe, and proceeding, like a detective story, by digging up evidence from the past, to a terrible and inevitable conclusion. Because of this perfection of form, one no longer senses a structural incompatibility between the drama of ideas and the drama of action — as one does, for example, in A Doll’s House, where a long discussion follows after the play has, for all intents and purposes, concluded. Idea and action are perfectly unified in the central image of the work.

The importance of this image is suggested by the fact that it is embodied in the title: Ghosts haunt the atmosphere — ghosts, as Mrs. Alving indicates, in a crucial passage, of two distinct kinds:

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of dead beliefs and things of that kind. . . . And we are so miserably afraid of the light.

Mrs. Alving’s ghosts, then, are (1) an intellectual inheritance — the specters of beliefs which continue to prevail long after they have lost their meaning, and (2) a spiritual inheritance — the spirits of the dead which inhabit the bodies of the living, controlling their lives and destinies. The dead ideas of the past are examined, and exploded, during Mrs. Alving’s conversations with various members of the household, especially Pastor Manders. By defending emancipated opinions, Mrs. Alving combats, for Ibsen, the hypocrisy and conventionality of such respectable pillars as the stodgy Pastor, opening up such “forbidden” subjects as incestuous marriages, premarital intercourse, intelligent child rearing, and female equality. This play of ideas — suffering the fate that Ibsen prophesied for all ideas — has now become a little ghostly too, while the conflict between Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders seems a little too easy and simplistic.

But Ibsen is much less interested in specific ideas than in a generalized insight. And Mrs. Alving, like Brand, emerges not only as a raisonneur, but as a tragic sufferer with serious flaws herself. It is in the drama of action that her basic flaws — a weakness of will coupled with a limitation in understanding — are exposed. For while she possesses all the right ideas, she lacks the Right Idea: a healthy skepticism about the power of ideas when not backed with some form of radical action. Well-intentioned, liberal-minded, intellectually wise, Mrs. Alving is nevertheless unable to forge an effective practice out of her theories, lacking the courage to act upon her convictions. Thus, despite the fact that she is devoted to enlightenment (Ibsen usually associates her with a lamp, lighting up dark places), she is herself benighted. And like Pastor Manders and his Dickensian shadow, Jacob Engstrand, she is a hypocrite, her actions determined by the pressure of public opinion and the fear of scandal.

Mrs. Alving’s moral hypocrisy is centered in the Orphanage, which, like Engstrand’s Sailor’s Home, is a respectable-looking monument built on a rotten foundation. By pouring Captain Alving’s fortune into this building, Mrs. Alving hopes to satisfy opinion, ease her guilty conscience, hide her husband’s past, throw off the Alving inheritance and preserve Oswald’s pure memories of his father; but it is too much for that delicate structure to bear. When the Orphanage burns up, it is as if all the lies of the past are burning with it (appropriately enough, Captain Alving’s name will now be perpetuated in Engstrand’s brothel). And Oswald, suffering from the last stages of inherited syphilis, is burning up too. Her awareness of Oswald’s disease signals the beginning of Mrs. Alving’s education, a process which will not conclude until the play is over. She had always looked on Oswald as an extension of herself, someone allowed the freedom which she had been denied, but now she learns that Oswald is himself a ghost, an extension of his dead father, carrying the family’s inheritance in his diseased veins. Trying to find the origin of the curse on the house of Alving, Mrs. Alving continues to exhume the past — and like Oedipus, discovers that she herself is the culprit.

The process, however, is gradual. Having been converted to Oswald’s vision of the joy of life, Mrs. Alving is finally able to admit to herself that she killed the sensual life of her husband, and compounded her guilt by remaining with him after he had turned profligate. Yet her education is still not complete. She still believes that she can set the crooked straight through an effort of understanding, and determines to save Oswald by enlightening him about the truth of his family background. But when all the murk has cleared, the sun of “enlightenment” comes up, and Oswald is finally able to “see your home properly,” he very appropriately goes mad. His disease has been inaccessible to emancipated opinions or advanced ideas, because — like Greek necessity and Christian original sin — it had determined his fate long before the action began. Mrs. Alving’s tragic education is now over. Like Oedipus, she has discovered that the past is unredeemable, for, like Oedipus’s killing of Laius at the crossroads, her decision to remain with her husband (a modern form of hamartia or tragic error) had started inexorable destructive engines in motion which the human will could no longer control. Dogged by Nemesis, pressed to an act of euthanasia, and screaming with characteristic indecision, she watches Oswald idiotically groping towards the sun, while the pure fjord landscape looms up beyond, as if rebuking the folly and futility of the entire modern world.

“The whole of mankind is on the wrong track,” wrote Ibsen in his notes to the play, thus indicating that Ghosts was not simply the tragedy of the Alving household, but the tragedy of nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe. For his underlying purpose here was to demonstrate how a series of withered conventions, unthinkingly perpetuated, could result in the annihilation not only of a conventional family but, by extension, the whole modern world. Thus, Mrs. Alving’s weakness, Oswald’s disease, Captain Alving’s profligacy, Engstrand’s hypocrisy, and Pastor Mander’s stupidity are all merely cankered buds sent up by the dying roots of modern society. For while Mrs. Alving believes in free will, she is nevertheless the victim of outmoded standards of behavior which were bound to result in ruin. Ghosts, therefore, while closely patterned on Sophoclean tragedy, lacks one Sophoclean essential: a fatalistic acceptance of human doom. Sophocles ascribes the destruction of his heroes to the will of the gods; Ibsen ascribes it to the stupidity and inhumanity of generation after generation of men. And so the implications of Ibsen’s position are the very opposite of Greek fatalism: even his belief in determinism implies a belief in will. For behind his conviction that mankind is on the wrong track is hidden his secret desire for a moral revolution through which mankind can once again be redeemed. Ibsen’s task, in these realistic plays, is not to champion this revolution but rather to show the need for it by exposing the corpse that infects the cargo of modern life. Thus, even in this detached and coldly objective work,¹⁷ Ibsen’s rebellion still continues to function, seething under the surface of his art.

In An Enemy of the People, which followed quite uncharacteristically within a year, Ibsen’s rebellion has once more broken through the realistic surface, propelled by his fury over the hostile reception tendered to Ghosts. Since he published the play before he had an opportunity to cool his anger or complicate his theme, An Enemy of the People is the most straightforwardly polemical work Ibsen ever wrote. He had said of Ghosts, with much pride and some accuracy, that “in the whole book there is not a single opinion, not a single remark to be found that is there on the dramatist’s account,” but all of An Enemy of the People is there “on the dramatist’s account.” His self-discipline momentarily weakened by his hurt pride, Ibsen has invested this play with the quality of a revolutionary pamphlet; and Stockmann, despite some perfunctory gestures towards giving him a life of his own, is very much like an author’s sounding board, echoing Ibsen’s private convictions about the filth and disease of modern municipal life, the tyranny of the compact majority, the mediocrity of parliamentary democracy, the cupidity of the Conservatives, and the hypocrisy of the Liberal press.

As a result, An Enemy of the People is both an inferior work of art and an invaluable example of Ibsen’s naked rebellion. Unlike Brand, who begins as a messianic rebel, Stockmann is converted to messianism through his growing awareness of the imperfections of modern humanity. And at the end of the play, his family gathered admiringly about him, he is preparing to reform the world through selective breeding, identifying himself with Luther and Christ.¹⁸ Because of Stockmann’s late development, the drama of action is almost completely subordinated to the drama of ideas; and Stockmann emerges as the only rebel in Ibsen’s drama whose defiant idealism is never tested in its effect on the happiness of others. The play shows Ibsen with his guard down, permitting his reformist tendencies to triumph momentarily over his self-critical dualism; and thus exposing his aristocratic idealism,¹⁹ the messianic quality which always lies at the bottom of his art.

Despite the crudeness, the vague hysteria, and the hollow posturing that sometimes characterize An Enemy of the People, it possesses a dynamism and energy which no other Ibsen prose work can boast, as if the author, unshackled by artistic complexity, were once more breathing the heady, exhilarating air of freedom. Actually, the play is a transitional work, which anticipates Ibsen’s later development. Apparently having grown dissatisfied with the restricting pseudo-impartiality of the objective mode, Ibsen is already preparing to forge a more personal, vigorous, and direct expression of his revolt. As it is, Stockmann is probably the first really positive hero that Ibsen has created since Julian the Apostate — but he is too simplistically heroic to satisfy the author’s dualism. In The Wild Duck, Ibsen pauses to punish himself severely for this self-indulgence by launching a murderous satirical attack on the messianic idealist. But after this, Ibsen is finished with the drama of the community. Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm follow, each dominated by a strong central character; and then comes the last phase of his career, in which the messianism of Brand is adapted to the realism of Ghosts, and the works are centered once again on the divided, semi-autobiographical hero.

Even The Wild Duck can probably be considered as a semi-autobiographical work, though it contains the harshest criticism Ibsen ever directed against himself, and is almost a repudiation of everything he had written thus far. In its more open form, its harshly satirical tone, and its unresolved conclusion, The Wild Duck bears out Ibsen’s contention that “in some ways this new play occupies a position by itself among my dramatic works.” But its novelty is especially clear in its intellectual stance, for it is the only play in which Ibsen completely denies the validity of revolt. Stockmann had declared, obviously with the author’s approval, that “all who live on lies must be exterminated like vermin.” Yet Gregers Werle — a fanatical Ibsenite, whose metaphors, attitudes, and symbol-mongering suggest he has carefully read each of the master’s works — exposes the lies of the Ekdal family, and succeeds only in mutilating everybody in it. In trying to follow Ibsenite principles, Gregers is, furthermore, excoriated so mercilessly that he almost seems a scapegoat. To use Ibsen’s angry descriptive images, he is a “quacksalver,” “mad, demented, crackbrained,” a neurotic busybody suffering from “an acute attack of integrity,” “morbid, overstrained,” a superfluity seeking a mission, “thirteenth at table” — in short, an ugly, unwanted, unattractive man.

Yet The Wild Duck must be interpreted less as a repudiation of Ibsenism than a corrective to it. For while Gregers seems to be a typical Ibsenite, he is actually a sadly unbalanced one — almost a caricature of Stockmann or Brand. His commitment to the ideal, for example, comes from without, not from within, since it is the consequence of his conscience pangs over his father’s sordid behavior; and he tries to realize the ideal not through his own heroic striving but through urging exemplary behavior on others. It is a sign of Gregers’s intellectual inadequacy that he should mistake that latter-day Peer Gynt, Hjalmar Ekdal, for a superior being; but it is also a sign that he is a very incomplete rebel. For while Gregers may possess Brand’s destructive fanaticism (his deadly effect on the Ekdals recalls Brand’s effect on his family), he lacks Brand’s heroic virtues, particularly his individualism and aristocratic will; Gregers is not a hero but a hero-worshiper. Ibsen is attacking the negative side of rebellion without bothering to affirm its positive side — an imbalance probably designed to correct the reverse imbalance in An Enemy of the People. Thus, Ibsen — who has suggested before, with much indignation, that the average man feeds on illusions — treats this insight now with a good deal more equanimity — not because he has grown more tolerant of the average man, but because he is more interested in attacking the inadequate idealist. It is doubtful that Ibsen has grown indifferent to the heroic claims of idealism and rebellion, since he continues to treat these with his usual respect in all his later plays. He is simply refusing to be institutionalized by slavish followers.²⁰ Most important, in satirizing the Ibsenite who tries to codify his principles into rigid formulae, Ibsen is satirizing the ideologist in himself — that indignant moralist who would smash human happiness for the sake of ennobling mankind.

In Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, Ibsen returns to the Classical form of Ghosts. Once again, a dead person determines the actions and characters of the play (General Gabler in Hedda; Beata in Rosmersholm); and once again, the rebel is treated with equivocal sympathy. Hedda is even more morbid and neurotic than Gregers, and almost as destructive; but having recovered his sense of dialectic, Ibsen puts Hedda in Romantic contrast to the bourgeois mediocrities whose lives she helps destroy. This contrast is even more striking in Rosmersholm. The action centers on isolated heroes rather than the conformist community, and the development of the play follows Rebecca’s gradual transformation under the influence of a harsh but heroic way of life (“The Rosmer view of life ennobles. But . . . it kills happiness”). After these transitional plays, Ibsen leaves off scourging the community, turning again to the tumult in the soul of the hero and becoming more and more subjective until he finally leaves realism behind altogether. It is the last phase of his career, coincident with his return to Norway after an exile, broken only by short visits, of twenty-seven years. The note of banishment is still struck; yet his last plays stand as a monument to an almost completed mission.

In the best play of this final period, The Master Builder, the religious, mystical, and poetic strains in Ibsen’s nature, repressed through a gigantic exertion of will, have burst forth again, now contained within a domestic but strongly symbolic framework and communicated through a prose heavily charged with ambiguity. Bygmester Solness is the most compelling of Ibsen’s later, brooding self-portraits, a messianic hero pulled down from the heights to reside in the community of men, and now painfully laboring to drag himself up again. This is, of course, pure autobiography; and, as has been often observed, the play contains many such elements, culled from Ibsen’s emotional, and sometimes even his “actual,” experience. The character of Hilda Wangel, for example — that voracious, beautifully plumed bird of prey who urges Solness towards a fatal demonstration of his will, virility, and potency — is based on an eighteen-year-old girl whom the sixty-four-year-old playwright had recently met (he called her “a May sun in a September life”). Solness’s fear that the younger generation will rise up and smite him suggests Ibsen’s fear of being eclipsed by rising young playwrights like Strindberg, Knut Hamsun, and Hauptmann. Solness’s sense that his unremitting dedication to his calling has destroyed his happiness is a reflection of Ibsen’s doubts and regrets, further expressed in John Gabriel Borkman, Little Eyolf, and When We Dead Awaken, about his own dedication as an artist. And Solness’s development as a builder, proceeding from towered churches to “homes for human beings” to towered houses, parallels Ibsen’s development from his epic poetic plays to his realistic prose works to the symbolic, poetic realism of his last period.

The most interesting biographical element in The Master Builder, for our purposes, is its strong messianic theme, which deserves special emphasis because it is so often overlooked.²¹ In this aspect of the play (which dominates the last act), Solness emerges as another Promethean rebel, similar in many ways to Emperor Julian, who is defined by his ambiguous relation to God. Long before the action begins, Solness had been a pious and reverent man, and had tried to express his devotion to God by building churches to His great glory. In return, Solness believes, God had rewarded him with certain superhuman powers — “helpers and servers” — which account for his fabulous luck and his tremendous will. Though this interpretation seems rather farfetched, Solness is not demented. His will — now somewhat diseased through remorse and fear — is indeed an almost supernatural instrument, providing him with a hypnotic power over his employees. And all through his career, Solness — somewhat like Haakon in The Pretenders — has been unusually favored by circumstances; even his career was initiated by a lucky catastrophe, for after his wife’s ancestral home had burned down, he had constructed a successful project on the ruins.

Yet, ever since that conflagration, Solness has been in revolt against God. When his children died as an indirect result of the fire, Solness blamed God for trying to rob him of his worldly happiness for the sake of a more complete dedication to his divine calling. Refusing to be the instrument of a celestial purpose, Solness repudiated God when hanging the wreath on the church tower at Lysanger, a negation which Hilda Wangel — who was present — somehow heard as the vibrations of “harps in the air.” At that moment, Solness dedicated his career not to religious monuments to the greater glory of God but to secular dwelling places for the greater comfort of human beings. But even as a “Free builder” he has felt no joy. Aline, his wife — consumed with self-reproach over the death of her children — has become a frigid Death-in-Life. And since the community has no real use for the homes he has built for it, Solness (like Ibsen) is himself consumed with remorse for having suppressed his aspiration towards the heights.

Now Solness fears Nemesis — the punishment of God — which he suspects will come in the shape of the younger generation battering down his door. And so it does, though not from the direction he expects. It is Hilda Wangel, his youthful admirer — and not his rival, the young apprentice Ragnar — who knocks ominously on his door, unwittingly becoming the Angel of the Lord. Hilda sees Solness through the idealizing distance of her childhood memories, and now she wants her ideal realized. Determined to whet his blunted spirit, she urges him “to do the impossible once again”; and Solness responds, basking in the warmth of her youth, hero worship, and Viking amorality. His will becomes more strong and certain; his conscience more robust; and his rebellion more defiant and dangerous. Convinced by Hilda that he is a superhuman being, beyond the good and evil of ordinary mortals, he determines to run away with her to build “castles in the air” — though he is still cautious enough to want a “firm foundation.”

But first he must earn her love, transcending his age and decline through a display of masculine potency. The opportunity arrives when he builds a tower on his new home (a religious pinnacle on a secular structure), and is persuaded by Hilda to hang a wreath on it, despite his attacks of vertigo. In terms of the religious aspect of the play, this is not only an act of hybris, but an act of blasphemy, since it is tantamount to a declaration of Godhead. And when he climbs up to the top, retribution speedily follows. Dizzied by the heights, and confused by Hilda’s enthusiastic waving of her shawl, Solness plummets to the earth; Hilda, applauding the achievement of the impossible ideal, continues to wave her shawl aloft, fixed on the hero but mindless of the broken human being at her feet. As the younger generation breaks into the garden she cries, “My — my Master Builder.”

It is a great cathedral of a play, with dark, mystical strains which boom like the chords of an organ. Since Ibsen is once again concerned with a powerful central hero who wills his fate, rather than a victim of a circumstantial process, the work has a feeling of loftiness and grandeur which has been missing from his art since the early days. As a heroic rebel, Solness is in a class with Ibsen’s epic heroes. Unlike Brand or Julian or Stockmann, he has no organized messianic doctrine with which to revolutionize the world, but his audacity and daring give him the stature that Mrs. Alving, Gregers, and Nora Helmer totally lacked. He is, in fact, one of the strongest in Ibsen’s gallery of individualists. Warring with God, he is finally conquered through overweening pride; but his defeat is a partial victory — he has also conquered God by attempting the deeds he feared most to do. Ibsen’s treatment of Solness shows that his interest in objective rebellion is now over for good. The Master Builder is free from all considerations of biology, determinism, and Darwinism (even the humanistic doctor is now assigned a secondary role), and the play cannot even be comprehended in a purely realistic reading. Ibsen’s symbolism has begun to dominate the action, making it suggestive and metaphorical rather than specific and concrete. For after building homes for human beings and finding little satisfaction in the task, Ibsen has now returned to the great towering structures of his early years — building them now, to be sure, on a “firm foundation” of disciplined form. Somewhat dizzied by the heights, fearful that his own powers are failing, he has apparently resolved to put a wreath on his career by returning to the free expression of his interior life which, for so many years, he had partially abandoned. In his next two plays, John Gabriel Borkman and Little Eyolf, the fjords, the mountains, and the sea have come into his work again, and in his last, When We Dead Awaken, he finally makes his way up to the heights to die.

Ibsen wrote When We Dead Awaken in 1899, when he was seventy-one. Subtitled “A Dramatic Epilogue,” it is clearly designed as the playwright’s final statement, even though he is to speak, right before his stroke, of entering the battlefield again “with new weapons and in new armor.” The weapons and armor of this play were novel enough to have shocked a number of usually sympathetic partisans, notably William Archer, who called it “wholly impossible,” “purely pathological,” “an exaggeration of manner to the pitch of mannerism.” Archer’s dislike for the play — based on his conviction that Ibsen had sacrificed “surface reality to underlying meaning” — can be quickly dismissed if we remember his own peculiar prejudices; it was Archer who rejected Elizabethan drama because of its “unrealistic” asides and soliloquies. When we cease regarding Ibsen purely as a prose realist, we will be able to see that When We Dead Awaken is not so much a new departure as a continuation and intensification of all his old themes, in which his mysticism, no longer concealed under an authenticated surface, has become more rampant and overt. In many ways, the play can be compared with Shakespeare’s late romances or Beethoven’s last quartets: the experimentation of an artist who is prepared to fall into excesses in order to expand the possibilities of his art. Like The Winter’s Tale, for example, the play is full of minor flaws, and often inconsistent in plot and character. But it shows no falling off at all in dramatic power. Quite the contrary, it is one of the most valuable testaments we have to Ibsen’s extraordinary mind and vision. And it suggests that, had he lived, Ibsen might have developed in the same direction as Strindberg or Maeterlinck, creating a drama of the soul to which the physical events of everyday life have been completely subordinated.

Ibsen’s last work concludes the series of autobiographical dramas begun with The Master Builder which deal with the aging rebel, despairing of life and racked with guilt, who experiences an ambiguous victory at the moment of death. Like Solness the architect, Rubek the sculptor is an artist whose work no longer satisfies him; like Solness, he is stimulated by a woman to acts of great daring, mortally straining himself in the process. Rubek, however, begins at a later point of development than any of Ibsen’s other heroes. Instead of realizing the incompatability of dedicated work and consuming love at the end of his life, he begins with this awareness; and throughout the action, therefore, he is trying to weld the two opposites into a synthesized whole. Actually, Rubek has chosen the joy of life over his calling before the play even begins. For after a life of hard work, he elected to spend his old age in semi-retirement — living with Maia, his wife, in a sunny Italian villa and turning out facile portrait busts of prominent men. Rubek, however, soon grew tired of this aimless happiness; and Maia began to bore him, too. Now, misanthropic, sullen, and indifferent to his wife, Rubek has returned North to a health resort, to sip seltzer and read newspapers near the fjords and mountains. At the same time that Maia chides him for his broken promises (he had offered to show her “all the glory of the world” from a high mountain), Rubek chides himself for his lost opportunities, still yearning for a great driving passion which will give his old age some meaning.

When he comes upon a mysterious lady in white, attended by a Sister of Mercy, Rubek thinks he has found what he has been seeking, for the lady turns out to be Irene, a former model and the inspiration for his earlier masterpiece, “Resurrection Day.” At that time, his work had been inspired by love; and now Rubek realizes that in Irene his warring conflicts were once resolved. The realization, however, comes too late. When Irene had offered to serve him “in frank, utter nakedness . . . with all the pulsing blood of my youth,” Rubek had rejected her. Fearing that his art would suffer if he permitted the materials to use the master, he merely thanked her for a “priceless episode” and went his way. The conflict between the artist-man and the mother-woman (a conflict Shaw is later to exploit) had resulted in Irene’s spiritual annihilation. Served too late, the God of Love becomes the God of Death, and she is now a frozen image from a world beyond the grave. Consumed with a desire for revenge, she plots to kill Rubek with a small stiletto which she carries with her. Regarded by realistic standards, she looks like a homicidal maniac, but realism is rather alien to the play; she is more like a symbolic figure — an allegorical spirit of Nemesis.²²

While Rubek seeks his resurrection in Irene, Maia seeks hers in Ulfheim, the bear hunter. In the crisscross structure of this play, the husband and wife switch partners as in an unearthly minuet. As the embodiment of sensuality, joy, warmth, and life (note the significance of her name), Maia is ideally suited to Ulfheim, about whom she notes, with a huge sense of relief, “There’s not a bit of the artist. . . .”²³ Both are healthy young animals with no desires beyond the satisfaction of their own immediate physical pleasures. Ulfheim, in fact, is a kind of satyr figure (“goatish and lecherous”); and his association with the hunt — with bears, dogs, red blood, and red meat — carries over into his love life: he regards all women as “game.” Nevertheless, it is this Scandinavian Stanley Kowalski who offers to fulfill Rubek’s forgotten promise to Maia; he will take her away from the “brackish ditchwater” and show her all the glories of the world, unsullied by “the trail and taint of men.” Uflheim and Maia, possessed with buoyant, Philistine joy, are from a totally different world from Rubek and Irene — the world of the living as opposed to the world of the dead — and even their mundane chitchat contrasts strongly with the charged mystical language of the sculptor and his model.

Rubek, too, has found his ideal mate, though for less exhilarating reasons. While trying to recapture his lost intensity through Irene, he discovers that, like her, he is dead, and “for the life you and I led,” as Irene tells him, “there is no resurrection.” Rubek’s growing awareness of his own deadness is further illustrated in his stone masterpieces. For this work — “our child,” as Irene calls it — is the main symbol of the “resurrection” theme of the play. Like Solness’s art (and like Ibsen’s), the sculpture has actually gone through three stages of development. The first, an image of transcendent hope and expectation, shows the figure of a young girl (Irene) rising from the dead and caught in an eternal moment. The second adds a series of contemporary figures. Like Rubek’s portrait busts, they have an externally respectable appearance, but are really “pompous horse-faces, and self-opinionated donkey muzzles, low-browed dog skulls, and fatted swine-snouts” — those “dear domestic animals” suggest what Ibsen now thinks of the characters in his realistic plays (not to mention the public that attends them). In the third stage, paralleling Ibsen’s last autobiographical period, the artist himself is in the foreground, weighed down with guilt, imprisoned in his “private hell,” suffering “remorse for a forfeited life.”

Despite this artistic insight into the futility of his hopes (“Never again in all eternity,” Rubek says of the artist-figure in the statuary, “will he attain to freedom and the new life”), Rubek still anticipates both transfiguration and resurrection through Irene. And it is her role to disillusion him, to kill his hopes, to show him the vanity of his striving: “When we dead awaken,” she reveals, “we see that we have never lived.” Nevertheless, despite Irene’s spectral despair, despite Rubek’s sin against the spirit of life, both are given a final opportunity to scale the heights to freedom. The two couples, newly paired, have spent the night on the mountainside. Irene, taunting Rubek, urges him “higher, higher — always higher.” Fearless of the storm which is about to break (the winds whirl about him, sounding like “the prelude to Resurrection Day”), Rubek is now determined to fulfill all his broken promises by ascending to the uttermost peak. His will grows so powerful, in fact, that Irene, forgetting her intention to kill him, follows Rubek joyfully — “up in the light, and in all the glittering glory! Up to the Peak of Promise.” As Ulfheim and Maia remain safely below, Rubek and Irene scale the mountain together to hold their marriage feast. But their climbing aspiration, like that of Brand, is finally climaxed by an avalanche; and the doomed couple are swallowed up by the snow. As they find an ambiguous fulfillment in death, the orgasm of the spirit which no other climax can exceed, Maia sings her song of liberation from below, “I am free as a bird! I am free!”

“I am free as a bird! I am free!” It could be Rubek’s epitaph as well. For, in this strange and tortured play, so reminiscent of Oedipus at Colonus, the sculptor finds his final release, after a life of errors, on the mountain of aspiration where only the gods can tread. Ibsen too was expressing his sense of release in this final testament of his art. For after a life of messianic striving, he is imaginatively feeling his way up the mountain, by Rubek’s side, to the wide, expansive area above. It had been thirty years since Brand’s prophetic cry that “Man must struggle till he dies,” and Ibsen had spent them all in heroic combat with the trolls in his heart and mind, rebelling against the human and divine forces which would limit individual freedom. His struggle had taken him up and down Europe, seeking a homeland, exiled in spirit from the modern world, always exposing its disease and corruption. And struggling to find truthful expressions for his double vision which would mirror both his own subjective rebellion and the conformity of modern society, he had wandered from the fjords and moorlands to the civilized plateau below, longing for the heights and raging against the depths. At the last, Ibsen had found his way back to the mountains where, free from the “taint” of man, liberation and revolt were pure and absolute. To a restless nature like his, always dissatisfied, always moving on, there could be no peace until death; and the total revolution he had envisioned in his youth could be realized only in apocalypse, in the pure, cold avalanche from the Northern skies. In When We Dead Awaken, the spiritual exile has found his homeland; the messianic prophet has found his ultimate truth; the tired artist has found his resting place. And Ibsen, the rebel, has found his release, after a lifetime of ceaseless aspiration.

¹ Brandes was not the only one to be impressed by Ibsen’s radicalism. Ibsen’s angry conversations at Bjørnsen’s house, during 1883, so astonished one of the guests that he wrote: “He is an absolute anarchist, wants to make a tabula rasa, put a torpedo under the whole Ark; mankind must begin again at the beginning of the world — and begin with the individual. . . . The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions — to destroy.” This letter was written one year before Ibsen wrote The Wild Duck.

² Eleven years later, in 1882, Ibsen is still carrying on in a similar vein: “I have not the gifts that go to make a satisfactory citizen. . . .” he writes. “Liberty is the first and highest condition for me. At home, they do not trouble very much about liberty, but about liberties — a few more, a few less, according to the standpoint of their party.”

³ Archer, however, when he settles down to discussing Ibsen’s plays, as he does in the excellent introductions to his English translations, is much more understanding and complex.

⁴ It is astonishing to what lengths certain critics will go to make Ibsen conform to their interpretations of him. Mencken, for example, asserts, without a shred of evidence, that Ibsen “lost his mind” while working on John Gabriel Borkman; this fantasy he probably invented to account for the mystical-symbolical qualities of that play, and of When We Dead Awaken which followed it. William Archer — also disturbed by the overt mysticism of Ibsen’s last play — speculated about it in a similar, though more circumspect, manner: “One could almost suppose [Ibsen’s] mental breakdown to have preceded instead of followed the writing of the latter play.” Ibsen’s so-called mental breakdown consisted of a stroke in which he lost control of his motor faculties. It occurred after the completion of When We Dead Awaken, and was definitely not an outbreak of insanity but rather a form of paralysis.

⁵ Shaw also reaches this conclusion by redefining words to suit his whims. For him, the “idealist” is one who worships existing conventions. The man whom we would call the idealist — one who, like himself and Ibsen, would strip the masks from conventions and replace them with unrealized ideals — Shaw calls a “realist.” Shaw’s whimsical approach to language produces a semantic confusion as bewildering as the medieval boggle over the realist and the nominalist. Shaw anticipated that “I shall be reproached for puzzling people by thus limiting the meaning of the term ideal” — but instead of being reproached, Shaw helped to establish a tradition of misapprehensions about Ibsen.

⁶ Janko Lavrin reports a conversation of Ibsen’s in which the playwright remarked that any idea, carried to its conclusion, usually touches on its own contradiction. Clearly, Ibsen is less interested in ideas, as such, than in the conflict of ideas — which is why he is a playwright and not a philosopher.

⁷ Ibsen himself considered Brand to be a purgative work: “It came into existence,” he wrote to Laura Kieler, “as the result of something I have lived through — not merely met in life; it was necessary for me to rid myself, through poetic creation, of something I had inwardly finished with.” Elsewhere, Ibsen wrote: “Creation has been to me like a bath, whence I have felt myself emerge purer, healthier, freer.”

⁸ Kierkegaard writes, “Let others complain that our times are wicked; I complain that they are contemptible, for they are without passion,” while Nietzsche complains not that man is bad but that “his baddest is so very small!”

⁹ Twenty-five years before Ibsen wrote Brand, Emerson was reflecting in a similar vein in his essay “Self-Reliance”: “The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. . . . Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times.”

¹⁰ Cf. the last verses of Ibsen’s early poem “On the Heights” (1859-1860), which also celebrates, in ringing tones, the absolute purity of life in natural surroundings, free from the pollutions of the city:

Now I am tempered like steel; I follow that call
which summons me to wander in the height!

I have lived out my lowland existence;
here on the moor there are freedom and God,
down there grope the others.

¹¹ Brand reflects on the limitations of the human will when he discovers that the wild gypsy girl, Gerd, had been born as an indirect result of his mother’s greed (she had rejected a poor wooer who thereupon fathered Gerd on a gypsy woman). This is an early example of Ibsen’s musings on parental guilt, a subject he will later explore in Ghosts. Ibsen’s ambivalent feelings about human freedom date from as early as 1858 where one finds, in The Vikings at Helgeland, this curious passage: “Man’s will can do this thing or that; but fate rules in the deeds that shape our lives.” In Emperor and Galilean (1873), Ibsen will try to work out, without too much success, his contradictory beliefs in both freedom and necessity.

¹² This phrase is used by Rebecca West in Rosmersholm. In that play, in Peer Gynt, and in most of Ibsen’s work, love is the one form of redemption that the author never questions, primarily because it is the only ideal which the author thought could ennoble mankind “from without.”

¹³ See Ibsen’s letter to Lucie Wolf (1883): “Verse has been most injurious to dramatic art. . . . It is improbable that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future; the aims of the dramatist of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it. It is therefore doomed. For art forms become extinct, just as the preposterous animal forms of prehistoric times become extinct when their day is over. . . . I myself have for the last seven or eight years hardly written a single verse; I have exclusively cultivated the very much more difficult art of writing the genuine, plain language spoken in life.”
     Ibsen, still very much the dramatic poet if no longer the poetic dramatist, is overstating his position here, as he admits a year later in another letter: “I still remember that I once expressed myself somewhat disrespectfully about the art of verse; but that was the result of my own personal connection with this art form at that particular moment.”

¹⁴ Ibsen’s interpretation of Jesus here is very close indeed to that of Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus, published in 1863, he had almost certainly read. See especially Chapter VII of Renan’s book, where Jesus is characterized as an absolute rebel, dedicated to civic anarchy and perfect idealism.

¹⁵ “Zola goes to bathe in the sewer,” wrote Ibsen, “I go to cleanse it.” This scouring of the social life could be construed as a positive act, and Ibsen, in a letter of 1886, did assign a social purpose to his work: “Each of us must strive to make the world’s social order better; this I am doing to the best of my powers.” Ibsen’s satire, however, usually approaches this end from a negative direction; only in Little Eyolf, which concludes with its central characters dedicating themselves to humanitarian ideals, does a positive purpose manifest itself. Shaw, nevertheless, takes this play as typical, and attributes to Ibsen ideological political opinions: “Thus we see that in Ibsen’s mind,” he writes in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, “the way to Communism lies through the most resolute and uncompromising Individualism.” This is nonsense; even in his most benevolent moods, Ibsen could never bear the idea of a planned society. Shaw’s inability or unwillingness to understand the anarchistic strain in Ibsen’s nature accounts, in part, for his insistent misrepresentations of the playwright.

¹⁶ Ibsen’s attitude towards the well-made play, like all his attitudes, is ambiguous. He used the French techniques — and he also despised them. Speaking of his own well-made dramas, he wrote: “These works have mostly a perfected technique, and therefore they please the public; they have nothing to do with poetry and therefore perhaps they please the public still more.” He was no more admiring of what he called “Scribe and Co.’s dramatic sweetmeats,” though he learned a good deal from the Scribean play. For an extended discussion of the influence of the well-made play on Ibsen’s structure, see Maurice Valency’s The Flower and the Castle.

¹⁷ “In none of my plays,” Ibsen wrote in the course of denying his kinship with any of the characters of Ghosts, “is the author so extrinsic, so completely absent, as in this last one.”

¹⁸ “I shall hurl my ink-pot at their heads!” shouts Stockmann, in an excess of rage, and determines, a little later, to gather twelve ragamuffins about him as disciples to whom he will pass on the legacy of revolt.

¹⁹ “Zola is a democrat,” wrote Ibsen, “I am an aristocrat,” meaning, of course, that he believed in an aristocracy of character. It is interesting to note what happens to this aristocrat when he falls into the hands of a democratic disciple like Arthur Miller, who bowdlerized An Enemy of the People for the Broadway stage. The antisocial elements of the play are called “fascistic,” and cut; its apocalyptic quality is tempered with moderateness and reason; and its posture of defiant individualism is watered down into a plea for the protection of minority groups. In his preface, Miller says that the play handles the “question of whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside at a time when the mass of men condemn it [sic!] as a dangerous and devilish lie.” Of course, the play does no such thing. But in order to fit the work to his liberal-democratic Procrustean bed, Miller proceeds to lop off its more radical limbs (Ibsen’s line “The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone,” for example, becomes, in Miller’s adaptation “We are the strongest people in the world and the strong must learn to be lonely” — a mere copybook maxim). We can all agree with Miller that unpopular political groups should be protected from governmental interference, but Ibsen’s polemic cuts a good deal deeper than that.

²⁰ In a letter to Brandes (1883), Ibsen wrote: “I maintain that an intellectual fighter in the outpost-line can never collect a majority. . . . Quite a compact crowd now stands where I stood when I wrote my various books, but I am no longer there myself; I am somewhere else — I hope, farther on.”

²¹ It is not overlooked, however, by Hermann Weigand, who gives a penetrating analysis of this “mystery play,” as he calls it, in his book The Modern Ibsen.

²² The similarity of Ibsen’s Irene to Dürrenmatt’s Claire Zachanassian in The Visit of the Old Lady is too striking to be overlooked. They not only display the same nonhuman, allegorical attributes, but also share a number of specific qualities: Irene, like Claire, has been married many times (to a Russian, a South American, etc.), was forced into a life of prostitution after the conclusion of her love affair, and has now dedicated herself to achieve revenge on the man who ruined her life. Dürrenmatt makes explicit what is already implicit in Ibsen’s play — the similarity between his heroine and certain figures of vengeance in Greek tragedy (Medea, Clytemnestra, the Furies).

²³ This phase stuck in the head of Ibsen’s great admirer, James Joyce, who used it, positively, to describe Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Joyce’s own play, Exiles, is, furthermore, very closely modeled on When We Dead Awaken in its structure, theme, and characters.