IN
the entire history of literature, there are few figures like Ibsen.
Practically his whole life and energies were devoted to the theater;
and his offerings, medicinal and bitter, have changed the history of
the stage. The story of his life -- his birth March 20, 1828, in the
little Norwegian village of Skien, the change in family circumstances
from prosperity to poverty when the boy was eight years old, his
studious and non-athletic boyhood, his apprenticeship to an apothecary
in Grimstad, and his early attempts at dramatic composition -- all
these items are well known. His spare hours were spent in preparation
for entrance to Christiania University, where, at about the age of
twenty, he formed a friendship with Björnson. About 1851 the violinist
Ole Bull gave Ibsen the position of "theater poet" at the newly built
National Theater in Bergen -- a post which he held for six years. In
1857 he became director of the Norwegian Theater in Christiania; and in
1862, with Love's Comedy, became known in his own country as a
playwright of promise. Seven years later, discouraged with the
reception given to his work and out of sympathy with the social and
intellectual ideals of his country, he left Norway, not to return for a
period of nearly thirty years. He established himself first at Rome,
later in Munich. Late in life he returned to Christiania, where he died
May 23, 1906.
The
productive life of Ibsen is conveniently divided into three periods:
the first ending in 1877 with the successful appearance of The Pillars of Society; the second covering the years in which he wrote most of the dramas of protest against social conditions, such as Ghosts; and the third marked by the symbolic plays, The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken. The first of the prose plays, Love's Comedy
(1862) made an impression in Norway, and drew the eyes of thoughtful
people to the new dramatist, though its satirical, mocking tone brought
upon its author the charge of being a cynic and an athiest. The three
historical plays, or dramatic poems, Brand, Emperor and Galilean, and Peer Gynt,
written between 1866 and 1873, form a monumental epic. These
compositions cannot be considered wholly or primarily for the stage;
they are the poetic record of a long intellectual and spiritual
struggle. In Brand there is the picture of the man who has not
found the means of adjustment between the mechanical routine of daily
living and the deeper claims of the soul; in Emperor and Galilean
is a portrayal of the noblest type of pagan philosophy and manhood,
illustrated in the Emperor Julian, set off against the ideals of the
Jewish Christ; and in Peer Gynt is a picture of the war within the soul of a man in whom are no roots of loyalty, faith, or steadfastness.
When The Young Men's League was produced, the occasion, like the first appearance of Hernani,
became locally historic. The play deals with political theories, ideas
of liberty and social justice; and in its presentation likenesses to
living people were discovered, and fierce resentments were aroused. The
tumult of hissing and applauding during the performance was so great
that the authorities interfered. The Pillars of Society,
Ibsen's fifteenth play, was the first to have a hearing throughout
Europe. It was written in Munich, where it was performed in the summer
of 1877. In the autumn it was enacted in all the theaters of
Scandinavia, whence within a few months it spread over the continent,
appearing in London before the end of the year. The late James Huneker,
one of the most acute critics of the Norwegian seer, said: "The
Northern Aristophanes, who never smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in The Pillars of Society
a varied row of white sepulchres. . . . There is no mercy in Ibsen, and
his breast has never harbored the milk of human kindness. This remote,
objective art does not throw out tentacles of sympathy. It is too
disdainful to make the slightest concession, hence the difficulty in
convincing an audience that the poet is genuinely humain."
The Pillars of Society
proved, once and for all, Ibsen's emancipation, first, from the thrall
of romanticism, which he had pushed aside as of no more worth than a
toy; and, secondly, from the domination of French technique, which he
had mastered and surpassed. In the plays of the second period there are
evident Ibsen's most mature gifts as a craftsman as well as that
peculiar philosophy which made him the Jeremiah of the modern social
world. In An Enemy of the People the struggle is between hypocrisy and greed on one side, and the ideal of personal honor on the other; in Ghosts there is an exposition of a fate-tragedy darker and more searching even than in Oedipus;
and in each of the social dramas there is exposed, as under the
pitiless lens of the microscope, some moral cancer. Ibsen forced his
characters to scrutinize their past, the conditions of the society to
which they belonged, and the methods by which they had gained their own
petty ambitions, in order that they might pronounce judgment upon
themselves. The action is still for the most part concerned with men's
deeds and outward lives, in connection with society and the world; and
his themes have largely to do with the moral and ethical relations of
man with man.
In
the third period the arena of conflict has changed to the realm of the
spirit; and the action illustrates some effort at self-realization,
self-conquest, or self-annihilation. The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken
must explain themselves, if they are to be explained at all; for they
are meaningless if they do not light, in the mind of the reader or
spectator, a spark of some clairvoyant insight with which they were
written. In them are characters which, like certain living men and
women, challenge and mystify even their closest friends and admirers.
Throughout all the plays there are symbols -- the wild duck, the mill
race, the tower, or the open sea -- which are but the external tokens
of something less familiar and more important; and the dialogue often
has a secondary meaning, not with the witty double entendre of
the French school, but with suggestions of a world in which the spirit,
ill at ease in material surroundings, will find its home.
It is significant that Ibsen should arrive, by his own route, at the very principles adopted by Sophocles and commended by Aristotle -- namely, the unities
of time, place and action, with only the culminating events of the
tragedy placed before the spectator. After the first period he wrote in
prose, abolishing all such ancient and serviceable contrivances as
servants discussing their masters' affairs, comic relief, asides and
soliloquies. The characters in his later dramas are few, and there are
no "veils of poetic imagery."
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