The quintessence of Ibsenism

University of California • Berkeley

Gift of

LUCILE HEMING KOSHLAND

and
DANIEL EDWARD KOSHLAND

With the Author's
Comphments.

THE QUINTESSENCE
OF IBSENISM: BY
G. BERNARD SHAW.

LONDON: WALTER SCOTT
24 WARWICK LANE. 1891

CONTENTiS.

I. The Two Pioneers

PAGE

I

II. Ideals and Idealists

19

III. The Womanly Woman

31

IV. The Plays

46

Brand

46

Peer Gynt

49

Emperor and Galilean

56

The League of Youth

1Z

Pillars of Society

75

A Doll's House

78

Ghosts

82

An Enemy of the People

92

The Wild Duck

96

Rosmersholm

100

The Lady from the Sea

109

Hedda Gabler

112

V. The Moral of the Plays

T TT

Appendix

135

PREFACE.

IN the spring of 1890, the Fabian Society,
finding itself at a loss for a course of lectures
to occupy its summer meetings, was com-
pelled to make shift with a series of papers put
forward under the general heading " Socialism
in Contemporary Literature." The Fabian
Essayists, strongly pressed to do " something or
other," for the most part shook their heads ; but
in the end Sydney Olivier consented to " take
Zola"; I consented to "take Ibsen"; and
Hubert Bland undertook to read all the Socialist
novels of the day, an enterprise the desperate
failure of which resulted in the most amusing
paper of the series. William Morris, asked to
read a paper on himself, flatly declined, but gave
us one on Gothic Architecture. Stepniak also
came to the rescue with a lecture on modern
Russian fiction ; and so the Society tided over
the summer without having to close its doors,
but also without having added anything what-

vi Preface.

ever to the general stock of information on
Socialism in Contemporary Literature. After this
I cannot claim that my paper on Ibsen, which
was duly read at the St James's Restaurant on
the 1 8th July 1890, under the presidency of
Mrs Annie Besant, and which was the first form
of this little book, is an original work in the
sense of being the result of a spontaneous in-
ternal impulse on my part. Havdng purposely
couched it in the most provocative terms (of
which traces may be found by the curious in
its present state), I did not attach much import-
ance to the somewhat lively debate that arose
upon it ; and I had laid it aside as a piece
d'occasion which had served its turn, when the
production of Rosinershohn at the Vaudeville
Theatre by Miss Farr, the inauguration of the
Independent Theatre by Mr J. T. Grein with a
performance of Ghosts, and the sensation created
by the experiment of Miss Robins and Miss Lea
with Hedda Gabler, started a frantic newspaper
controversy, in which I could see no sign of any
of the disputants having ever been forced by
circumstances, as I had, to make up his mind
definitely as to what Ibsen's plays meant, and to
defend his view face to face with some of the

Preface. vii

keenest debaters in London. I allow due weight
to the fact that Ibsen himself has not enjoyed
this advantage (see page 56) ; but I have also
shewn that the existence of a discoverable and
perfectly definite thesis in a poet's work by no
means depends on the completeness of his own
intellectual consciousness of it. At any rate,
the controversialists, whether in the abusive
stage, or the apologetic stage, or the hero wor-
shipping stage, by no means made clear what
they were abusing, or apologizing for, or going
into ecstasies about ; and I came to the con-
clusion that my explanation might as well be
placed in the field until a better could be found.
With this account of the origin of the book,
and a reminder that it is not a critical essay on
the poetic beauties of Ibsen, but simply an ex-
position of Ibsenism, I offer it to the public to
make what they can of.

London, /zm^ 1891.

THE QUINTESSENCE

OF

IBSEN ISM.
I.

THE TWO PIONEERS.

THAT is, pioneers of the march to the plains
of heaven (so to speak).

The second, whose eyes are in the back
of his head, is the man who declares that it is
wrong to do something that no one has hitherto
seen any harm in.

The first, whose eyes are very longsighted and
in the usual place, is the man who declares that
it is right to do something hitherto regarded as
infamous.

The second is treated with great respect by
the army. They give him testimonials ; name
him the Good Man ; and hate him like the
devil.

The first is stoned and shrieked at by the
whole army. They call him all manner of oppro-
brious names ; grudge him his bare bread and
A

2 . Tlie Qiiintesse7ice of Ibsenism.

water; and secretly adore him as their saviour
from utter despair.

Let me take an example from life of my
pioneer. Shelley was a pioneer and nothing else :
he did both first and second pioneer's work.

Now compare the effect produced by Shelley
as abstinence preacher or second pioneer with
that which he produced as indulgence preacher
or first pioneer. For example : —

Second Pioneer Proposition. — It is wrong
to kill animals and eat them.

First Pioneer Proposition.— It is not
wrong to take your sister as your wife.

Here the second pioneer appears as a gentle
humanitarian, and the first as an unnatural
corrupter of public morals and family life. So
much easier is it to declare the right wrong than
the wrong right in a society with a guilty con-
science, to which, as to Dickens's detective,
" Any possible move is a probable move pro-
vided it's in a wrong direction." Just as the
liar's punishment is, not in the least that he
is not believed, but that he cannot believe any
one else, so a guilty society can more easily be
persuaded that any apparently innocent act is
guilty than that any apparently guilty act is
innocent.

The English newspaper which best represents
the guilty conscience of the middle class, or

The Tivo Pioneers. , 3

dominant factor in society to-day, is the Daily
Telegraph. If we can find the Daily Telegraph
speaking of Ibsen as the Quarterly Review used
to speak of Shelley, it will occur to us at once
that there must be something of the first pioneer
about Ibsen.

Mr Clement Scott, dramatic critic to the
Daily Telegraph, a good - natured gentleman,
not a pioneer, but emotional, impressionable,
zealous, and sincere, accuses Ibsen of dramatic
impotence, ludicrous amateurishness, nastiness,
vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, absurdity, un-
interesting verbosity, and suburbanity, declar-
ing that he has taken ideas that would have
inspired a great tragic poet, and vulgarized
and debased them in dull, hateful, loathsome,
horrible plays. This criticism, which occurs in
a notice of the first performance of Ghosts in
England, is to be found in the Daily Telegraph for
the 14th March 1891, and is supplemented by a
leading article which compares the play to an
open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a
dirty act done publicly, or a lazar house with all
its doors and windows open. Bestial, cynical,
disgusting, poisonous, sickly, delirious, indecent,
loathsome, fetid, literary carrion, crapulous stuff,
clinical confessions : all these epithets are used
in the article as descriptive of Ibsen's work.
" Realism," says the writer, " is one thing ; but

4 The Qiiintessetice of Ibsenism.

the nostrils of the audience must not be visibly
held before a play can be stamped as true to
nature. It is difficult to expose in decorous
words — the gross, and almost putrid indecorum
of this play." As the performance of Ghosts
took place on the evening of the 13th March,
and the criticism appeared next morning, it is
evident that Mr Scott must have gone straight
from the theatre to the newspaper office, and there,
in an almost hysterical condition, penned his
share of this extraordinary protest. The literary
workmanship bears marks of haste and disorder,
which, however, only heighten the expression of
the passionate horror produced in the writer by
seeing Ghosts on the stage. He calls on the
authorities to cancel the license of the theatre,
and declares that he has been exhorted to laugh
at honour, to disbelieve in love, to mock at
virtue, to distrust friendship, and to deride
fidelity. If this document were at all singular,
it would rank as one of the curiosities of criticism,
exhibiting, as it does, the most seasoned play-
goer in the world thrown into convulsions by a
performance which was witnessed with approval,
and even with enthusiasm, by many persons of
approved moral and artistic conscientiousness.
But Mr Scott's criticism was hardly distin-
guishable in tone from hundreds of others which
appeared simultaneously. His opinion was the

The Tzvo Pioneers. 5

vulgar opinion. Mr Alfred Watson, critic to
the Standard, the leading Tory daily paper, pro-
posed that proceedings should be taken against
the theatre under Lord Campbell's Act for the
suppression of disorderly houses. Clearly Mr
Scott and his editor Sir Edwin Arnold, with
whom rests the responsibility for the article
which accompanied the criticism, may claim to
represent a considerable party. How then is
it that Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright of Euro-
pean celebrity, attracts one section of the Eng-
lish people so strongly that they hail him as
the greatest living dramatic poet and moral
teacher, whilst another section is so revolted by
his works that they describe him in terms which
they themselves admit are, by the necessities of
the case, all but obscene? This phenomenon,
which has occurred throughout Europe wherever
Ibsen's plays have been acted, as well as in
America and Australia, must be exhaustively
explained before the plays can be described
without danger of reproducing the same con-
fusion in the reader's own mind. Such an
explanation, therefore, must be my first business.
Understand, at the outset, that the explana-
tion will not be an explaining away. Mr
Clement Scott's judgment has not misled him in
the least as to Ibsen's meaning. Ibsen means
all that most revolts his critic. For example, in

6 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

Ghosts, the play in question, a clergyman and a
married woman fall in love with one another.
The woman proposes to abandon her husband
and live with the clergyman. He recalls her to
her duty, and makes her behave as a virtuous
woman. She afterwards tells him that this was
a crime on his part. Ibsen agrees with her,
and has written the play to bring you round to
his opinion. Mr Clement Scott does not agree
with her, and believes that when you are brought
round to her opinion you will be morally
corrupted. By this conviction he is impelled to
denounce Ibsen as he does, Ibsen being equally
impelled to propagate the convictions which pro-
voke the attack. Which of the two is right can-
not be decided until it is ascertained whether a
society of persons holding Ibsen's opinions would
be higher or lower than a society holding Mr
Clement Scott's.

There are many people who cannot conceive
this as an open question. To them a denuncia-
tion of any of the recognized virtues is an incite-
ment to unsocial conduct ; and every utterance in
which an assumption of the eternal validity of
these virtues is not implicit, is a paradox. Yet
all progress involves the beating of them from
that position. By way of illustration, one may
rake up the case of Proudhon, who nearly half
a century ago denounced "property" as theft.

TJie Tzvo Pioneers. 7

This was thought the very maddest paradox that
ever man hazarded : it seemed obvious that a
society which countenanced such a proposition
would speedily be reduced to the condition of a
sacked city. To-day schemes for the confisca-
tion by taxation of mining royalties and ground
rents are commonplaces of social reform ; and
the honesty of the relation of our big property
holders to the rest of the community is challenged
on all hands. It would be easy to multiply in-
stances, though the most complete are now
ineffective through the triumph of the original
" paradox " having obliterated all memory of the
opposition it first had to encounter. The point
to seize is that social progress takes effect
through the replacement of old institutions by
new ones ; and since every institution involves
the recognition of the duty of conforming to it,
progress must involve the repudiation of an
established duty at every step. If the English-
man had not repudiated the duty of absolute
obedience to his king, his political progress would
have been impossible. If women had not re-
pudiated the duty of absolute submission to their
husbands, and defied public opinion as to the
limits set by modesty to their education, they
would never have gained the protection of the
Married Women's Property Act or the power
to qualify themselves as medical practitioners.

8 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

If Luther had not trampled on his duty to the
head of his Church and on his vow of chastity,
our priests would still have to choose between
celibacy and profligacy. There is nothing new,
then, in the defiance of duty by the reformer :
every step of progress means a duty repudiated,
and a scripture torn up. And every reformer is
denounced accordingly, Luther as an apostate,
Cromwell as a traitor, Mary Wollestonecraft as
an unwomanly virago, Shelley as a libertine, and
Ibsen as all the things enumerated in the Daily
Telegraph.

This crablike progress of social evolution, in
which the individual advances by seeming to go
backward, continues to illude us in spite of all
the lessons of history. To the pious man the
newly made freethinker, suddenly renouncing
supernatural revelation, and denying all obliga-
tion to believe the Bible and obey the command-
ments as such, appears to be claiming the right
to rob and murder at large. But the freethinker
soon finds reasons for not doing what he does
not want to do ; and these reasons seem to him
to be far more binding on the conscience than
the precepts of a book of which the divine in-
spiration cannot be rationally proved. The pious
man is at last forced to admit — as he was in the
case of the late Charles Bradlaugh, for instance
— that the disciples of Voltaire and Tom Paine

The Tiuo Pioneers. 9

do not pick pockets or cut throats oftener than
your even Christian : he actually is driven to
doubt whether Voltaire himself really screamed
and saw the devil on his deathbed.

This experience by no means saves the ration-
alist * from falling into the same conservatism
when the time comes for his own belief to
be questioned. No sooner has he triumphed
over the theologian than he forthwith sets up as
binding on all men the duty of acting logically
with the object of securing the greatest good of
the greatest number, with the result that he is
presently landed in vivisection, Contagious
Diseases Acts, dynamite conspiracies, and other
grotesque but strictly reasonable abominations.
Reason becomes Dagon, Moloch, and Jehovah
rolled into one. Its devotees exult in having
freed themselves from the old slavery to a col-
lection of books written by Jewish men of letters.
To worship such books was, they can prove,
manifestly as absurd as to worship sonatas com-
posed by German musicians, as was done by
the hero of Wagner's novelette, who sat up on
his deathbed to say his creed, beginning, " I
believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven." The
Voltairian freethinker despises such a piece of

* I had better here warn students of philosophy that I
am speaking of rationalism, not as classified in the books,
but as apparent in men.

lO TJie Quintessence of Ibsenism.

sentiment ; but is it not much more sensible to
worship a sonata constructed by a musician than
to worship a syllogism constructed by a logician,
since the sonata may at least inspire feelings of
awe and devotion ? This does not occur to the
votary of reason ; and rationalist " free-think-
ing" soon comes to mean syllogism worship
with rites of human sacrifice ; for just as the
rationalist's pious predecessor thought that the
man who scoffed at the Bible must infallibly
yield without resistance to all his criminal pro-
pensities, so the rationalist in turn becomes
convinced that when a man once loses his faith
in Mr Herbert Spencer's Data of Ethics, he is
no longer to be trusted to keep his hands off
his neighbour's person, purse, or wife.

In process of time the age of reason had to go
its way after the age of faith. In actual expe-
rience, the first shock to rationalism came from
the observation that though nothing could per-
suade women to adopt it, their inaptitude for
reasoning no more prevented them from arriving
at right conclusions than the masculine aptitude
for it saved men from arriving at wrong ones.
When this generalization had to be modified in
view of the fact that some women did at last
begin to try their skill at ratiocination, reason was
not re-established on the throne ; because the
result of Woman's reasoning was that she began

Tlie Tivo Pioneers. ii

to fall into all the errors which men are just learn-
ing to mistrust. From the moment she set about
doing things for reasons instead of merely find-
ing reasons for what she wanted to do, there was
no saying what mischief she would be at next ;
since there are just as good reasons for burning
a heretic at the stake as for rescuing a ship-
wrecked crew from drowning — in fact, there
are better. One of the first and most famous
utterances of rationalism would have condemned
it without further hearing had its full signifi-
cance been seen at the time. Voltaire, taking
exception to the trash of some poetaster, was
met with the plea " One must live." " I dont
see the necessity," replied Voltaire. The evasion
was worthy of the Father of Lies himself ; for
Voltaire was face to face with the very neces-
sity he was denying — must have known, con-
sciously or not, that it was the universal postulate
— would have understood, if he had lived to-
day, that since all human institutions are con-
structed to fulfil man's will, and that his will
is to live even when his reason teaches him to
die, logical necessity, which was the sort Voltaire
meant (the other sort being visible enough)
can never be a motor in human action, and is,
in short, not necessity at all. But that was
not brought to light in Voltaire's time ; and
he died impenitent, bequeathing to his disciples

1 2 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

that most logical of agents, the guillotine, which
also "did not see the necessity." In our own
century the recognition of the will as distinct
from the reasoning machinery began to spread.
Schopenhauer was the first among the moderns *
to appreciate the enormous practical importance
of the distinction, and to make it clear to
amateur metaphysicians by concrete instances.
Out of his teaching came the formulation of the
dilemma that Voltaire shut his eyes to. Here it
is. Rationally considered, life is only worth
living when its pleasures are greater than its

■^ I say the moderns, because the will is our old
friend the soul or spirit of man ; and the doctrine of jus-
tification, not by works, but by faith, clearly derives its
validity from the consideration that no action, taken
apart from the will behind it, has any moral character :
for example, the acts which make the murderer and
incendiary infamous are exactly similar to those which
make the patriotic hero famous. " Original sin " is the
will doing mischief. "Divine grace" is the will doing
good. Our fathers, unversed in the Hegelian dialectic,
could not conceive that these two, each the negation of
the other, were the same. Schopenhauer's philosophy,
like that of all pessimists, is really based on the old
view of the will as original sin, and on the 1750-1850
view that the intellect is the divine grace that is to save
us from it. It is as well to warn those who fancy that
Schopenhaucrism is one and indivisible, that acceptance
of its metaphysics by no means involves endorsement of
its philosophy.

The Two Pioneers. 13

pains. Now to a generation which has ceased to
believe in heaven, and has not yet learned that
the degradation by poverty of four out of every
five of its number is artificial and remediable, the
fact that life is not worth living is obvious. It is
useless to pretend that the pessimism of Kohe-
leth, Shakspere, Dryden, and Swift can be refuted
if the world progresses solely by the destruction
of the unfit, and yet can only maintain its civi-
lization by manufacturing the unfit in swarms of
which that appalling proportion of four to one
represents but the comparatively fit surviv^ors.
Plainly then, the reasonable thing for the ration-
alists to do is to refuse to live. But as none of
them will commit suicide in obedience to this
demonstration of " the necessity " for it, there is
an end of the notion that we live for reasons
instead of in fulfilment of our will to live. Thus
we are landed afresh in mystery ; for positive
science gives no account whatever of this will to
live. Indeed the utmost light that positive science
throws is but feeble in comparison with the
illumination that was looked forward to when it
first began to dazzle us with its analyses of the
machinery of sensation — its researches into the
nature of sound and the construction of the ear,
the nature of light and the construction of the
eye, its measurement of the speed of sensation,
its localization of the functions of the brain,

14 The Qtmitessence of Ibsenism.

and its hints as to the possibility of producing a
homunculus presently as the fruit of its chemical
investigation of protoplasm. The fact remains
that when Darwin, Haeckel, Helmholtz, Young,
and the rest, popularized here among the middle
class by Tyndall and Huxley, and among the
proletariat by the lectures of the National Secu-
lar Society, have taught you all they know, you
are still as utterly at a loss to explain the fact
of consciousness as you would have been in the
days when you were satisfied with Chambers'
Vestiges of Creation. Materialism, in short, only
isolated the great mystery of consciousness by
clearing away several petty mysteries with which
we had confused it; just as rationalism isolated the
great mystery of the will to live. The isolation
made both more conspicuous than before. We
thought we had escaped for ever from the
cloudy region of metaphysics ; and we were only
carried further into the heart of them.*

■^ The correlation between rationalism and materialism
in this process has some immediate practical import-
ance. Those who give up materialism whilst clinging to
rationalism generally either relapse into abject submis-
sion to the most paternal of the Churches, or are caught
by the attempts, constantly renewed, of mystics to found
a new faith by rationalizing on the hollowness of mate-
rialism. The hollowness has nothing in it ; and if you
have come to grief as a materialist by reasoning about
something, you are not likely, as a mystic, to improve
matters by reasoning about nothing.

The Two Pioneers. 15

We have not yet worn off the strangeness of
the position to which we have now been led.
Only the other day our highest boast was that
we were reasonable human beings. To-day we
laugh at that conceit, and see ourselves as wilful
creatures. Ability to reason accurately is as
desirable as ever, since it is only by accurate
reasoning that we can calculate our actions so
as to do what we intend to do — that is, to fulfil
our will ; but faith in reason as a prime motor is
no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any
more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of
righteous intention.

At this point, accordingly, the illusion as to
the retrogressive movement of progress recurs
as strongly as ever. Just as the beneficent step
from theology to rationalism seems to the
theologist a growth of impiety, does the step
from rationalism to the recognition of the will
as the prime motor strike the rationalist as a
lapse of common sanity, so that to both theolo-
gist and rationalist progress at last appears
alarming, threatening, hideous, because it seems
to tend towards chaos. The deists Voltaire and
Tom Paine were, to the divines of their day,
predestined devils, tempting mankind hellward.
To deists and divines alike Ferdinand Lassalle,
the godless self-worshipper and man-worshipper
would have been a monster. Yet many who to-

1 6 The Qiimtessence of Ibsenisin.

day echo Lassalle's demand that economic and
political institutions should be adapted to the
poor man's will to eat and drink his fill out of
the product of his own labour, are revolted by
Ibsen's acceptance of the impulse towards greater
freedom as sufficient ground for the repudiation
of any customary duty, however sacred, that
conflicts with it. Society — were it even as free
as Lassalle's Social-Democratic republic — rmisiy
it seems to them, go to pieces when conduct is
no longer regulated by inviolable covenants.

For what, during all these overthrowings of
things sacred and things infallible, has been
happening to that pre-eminently sanctified
thing, Duty? Evidently it cannot have come
off scatheless. First there was man's duty to
God, with the priest as assessor. That was
repudiated ; and then came Man's duty to his
neighbour, with Society as the assessor. Will
this too be repudiated, and be succeeded by
Man's duty to himself, assessed by himself?
And if so, what will be the effect on the con-
ception of Duty in the abstract ? Let us see.

I have just called Lassalle a self-worshipper.
In doing so I cast no reproach on him ; for
this is the last step in the evolution of the
conception of duty. Duty arises at first, a
gloomy tyranny, out of man's helplessness, his
self- mistrust, in a word, his abstract fear. He

The Tzvo Pioneers. \y

personifies all that he abstractly fears as God,
and straightway becomes the slave of his duty
to God. He imposes that slavery fiercely on
his children, threatening them with hell, and
punishing them for their attempts to be happy.
When, becoming bolder, he ceases to fear every-
thing, and dares to love something, this duty of
his to what he fears evolves into a sense of duty
to what he loves. Sometimes he again personi-
fies what he loves as God; and the God of Wrath
becomes the God of Love : sometimes he at once
becomes a humanitarian, an altruist, acknowledg-
ing only his duty to his neighbour. This stage is
correlative to the rationalist stage in the evolu-
tion of philosophy and the capitalist phase in the
evolution of industry. But in it the emancipated
slave of God falls under the dominion of Society,
which, having just reached a phase in which all
the love is ground out of it by the competitive
struggle for money, remorselessly crushes him
until, in due course of the further growth of his
spirit or will, a sense at last arises in him of his
duty to himself. And when this sense is fully
grown, which it hardly is yet, the tyranny of duty
is broken ; for now the man's God is himself ;
and he, self-satisfied at last, ceases to be selfish.
The evangelist of this last step must therefore
preach the repudiation of duty. This, to the un-
prepared of his generation, is indeed the wanton
B

1 8 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

masterpiece of paradox. What ! after all that
has been said by men of noble life as to the
secret of all right conduct being only " Duty,
duty, duty," is he to be told now that duty is
the primal curse from which we must redeem
ourselves before we can advance another step
on the road along which, as we imagine — having
forgotten the repudiations made by our fathers
— duty and duty alone has brought us thus
far? But why not? God was once the most
sacred of our conceptions ; and he had to be
denied. Then Reason became the Infallible
Pope, only to be deposed in turn. Is Duty
more sacred than God or Reason ?

Having now arrived at the prospect of the
repudiation of duty by Man, I shall make a
digression on the subject of ideals and idealists,
as treated by Ibsen. I shall go round in a loop,
and come back to the same point by way of the
repudiation of duty by Woman ; and then at last
I shall be in a position to describe the plays
without risk of misunderstanding.

w

II.

IDEALS AND IDEALISTS.

E have seen that as Man grows through the
ages, he finds himself bolder by the growth
of his spirit (if I may so name the un-
known) and dares more and more to love and
trust instead of to fear and fight. But his courage
has other effects : he also raises himself from
mere consciousness to knowledge by daring more
and more to face facts and tell himself the
truth. For in his infancy of helplessness and
terror he could not face the inexorable ; and
facts being of all things the most inexorable, he
masked all the threatening ones as fast as he
discovered them ; so that now every mask re-
quires a hero to tear it off. The king of terrors,
Death, was the Arch-Inexorable : Man could
not bear the dread of that thought. He must
persuade himself that Death could be propi-
tiated, circumvented, abolished. How he fixed
the mask of immortality on the face of Death for
this purpose we all know. And he did the like
with all disagreeables as long as they remained
inevitable. Otherwise he must have gone mad

20 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

with terror of the grim shapes around him,
headed by the skeleton with the scythe and
hourglass. The masks were his ideals, as he
called them ; and what, he would ask, would
life be without ideals? Thus he became an
idealist, and remained so until he dared to
begin pulling the masks off and looking the
spectres in the face — dared, that is, to be more
and more a realist. But all men are not equally
brave ; and the greatest terror prevailed when-
ever some realist bolder than the rest laid hands
on a mask which they did not yet dare to do
without.

We have plenty of these masks around us
still — some of them more fantastic than any
of the Sandwich islanders' masks in the British
Museum. In our novels and romances especially
we see the most beautiful of all the masks —
those devised to disguise the brutalities of the
sexual instinct in the earlier stages of its de-
velopment, and to soften the rigorous aspect of
the iron laws by which Society regulates its
gratification. When the social organism be-
comes bent on civilization, it has to force mar-
riage and family life on the individual, because
it can perpetuate itself in no other way whilst
love is still known only by fitful glimpses, the
basis of sexual relationship being in the main
mere physical appetite. Under these circum-

Ideals and Idealists. 21

stances men try to graft pleasure on necessity
by desperately pretending that the institution
forced upon them is a congenial one, making
it a point of public decency to assume always
that men spontaneously love their kindred better
than their chance acquaintances, and that the
woman once desired is always desired : also that
the family is woman's proper sphere, and that
no really womanly woman ever forms an attach-
ment, or even knows what it means, until she
is requested to do so by a man. Now if
anyone's childhood has been embittered by the
dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his
father ; if his wife has ceased to care for him
and he is heartily tired of his wife ; if his brother
is going to law with him over the division
of the family property, and his son acting in
studied defiance of his plans and wishes, it is
hard for him to persuade himself that passion
is eternal and that blood is thicker than water.
Yet if he tells himself the truth, all his life seems
a waste and a failure by the light of it. It comes
then to this, that his neighbours must either
agree with him that the whole system is a mis-
take, and discard it for a new one, which cannot
possibly happen until social organization so far
outgrows the institution that Society can per-
petuate itself without it ; or else they must keep
him in countenance by resolutely making believe

22 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

that all the illusions with which it has been
masked are realities.

For the sake of precision, let us imagine a
community of a thousand persons, organized
for the perpetuation of the species on the basis
of the British family as we know it at present.
Seven hundred of them, we will suppose, find the
British family arrangement quite good enough
for them. Two hundred and ninety-nine find it
a failure, but must put up with it since they are
in a minority. The remaining person occupies
a position to be explained presently. The 299
failures will not have the courage to face the
fact that they are failures — irremediable failures,
since they cannot prevent the 700 satisfied ones
from coercing them into conformity with the
marriage law. They will accordingly try to
persuade themselves that, whatever their own
particular domestic arrangements may be, the
family is a beautiful and holy natural institu-
tion. For the fox not only declares that the
grapes he cannot get are sour : he also insists that
the sloes he can get are sweet. Now observe what
has happened. The family as it really is is a
conventional arrangement, legally enforced, which
the majority, because it happens to suit them,
think good enough for the minority, whom it
happens not to suit at all. The family as a beau-
tiful and holy natural institution is only a fancy

Ideals and Idealists. 23

picture of what every family would have to be if
everybody was to be suited, invented by the
minority as a mask for the reality, which in its
nakedness is intolerable to them. We call this
sort of fancy picture an IDEAL ; and the policy
of forcing individuals to act on the assumption
that all ideals are real, and to recognize and
accept such action as standard moral conduct,
absolutely valid under all circumstances, con-
trary conduct or any advocacy of it being dis-
countenanced and punished as immoral, may
therefore be described as the policy of IDEALISM.
Our 299 domestic failures are therefore become
idealists as to marriage ; and in proclaiming the
ideal in fiction, poetry, pulpit and platform
oratory, and serious private conversation, they
will far outdo the 700 who comfortably accept
marriage as a matter of course, never dreaming
of calling it an " institution," much less a holy
and beautiful one, and being pretty plainly of
opinion that idealism is a crackbrained fuss about
nothing. The idealists, hurt by this, will retort
by calling them Philistines. VVe then have our
society classified as 700 Philistines and 299
idealists, leaving one man unclassified. He is the
man who is strong enough to face the truth that
the idealists are shirking. He says flatly of
marriage, " This thing is a failure for many of us.
It is insufferable that two human beings, having

24 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

entered into relations which only warm affection
can render tolerable, should be forced to main-
tain them after such affections have ceased to
exist, or in spite of the fact that they have never
arisen. The alleged natural attractions and
repulsions upon which the family ideal is based
do not exist ; and it is historically false that the
family was founded for the purpose of satisfying
them. Let us provide otherwise for the social
ends which the family subserves, and then abol-
ish its compulsory character altogether." What
will be the attitude of the rest to this outspoken
man ? The Philistines will simply think him
mad. But the idealists will be terrified beyond
measure at the proclamation of their hidden
thought — at the presence of the traitor among
the conspirators of silence — at the rending of the
beautiful veil they and their poets have woven to
hide the unbearable face of the truth. They will
crucify him, burn him, violate their own ideals of
family affection by taking his children away from
him, ostracize him, brand him as immoral, pro-
fligate, filthy, and appeal against him to the
despised Philistines, specially idealized for the
occasion as SOCIETY. How far they will proceed
against him depends on how far his courage ex-
ceeds theirs. At his worst, they call him cynic
and paradoxer : at his best they do their utmost
to ruin him if not to take his life. Thus, purblindly

Ideals and Idealists. 25

courageous moralists like Mandeville and La-
rochefoucauld, who merely state unpleasant facts
without denying the validity of current ideals,
and who indeed depend on those ideals to make
their statements piquant, get off with nothing
worse than this name of cynic, the free use of
which is a familiar mark of the zealous idealist.
But take the case of the man who has already
served us as an example — Shelley. The idealists
did not call Shelley a cynic : they called him a
fiend until they invented a new illusion to enable
them to enjoy the beauty of his lyrics — said
illusion being nothing less than the pretence
that since he was at bottom an idealist him-
self, his ideals must be identical with those of
Tennyson and Longfellow, neither of whom ever
wrote a line in which some highly respectable
ideal was not implicit.*

* The following are examples of the two stages of
Shelley criticism : —

" We feel as if one of the darkest of the fiends had
been clothed with a human body to enable him to gratify
his enmity against the human race, and as if the super-
natural atrocity of his hate were only heightened by his
power to do injury. So strongly has this impression
dwelt upon our minds that we absolutely asked a friend,
who had seen this individual, to describe him to us — as if
a cloven hoof, or horn, or flames from the mouth, must
have marked the external appearance of so bitter an
enemy of mankind." {Literary Gazette^ 19th May 182 1.)

" A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void

26 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

Here the admission that Shelley, the realist,
was an idealist too, seems to spoil the whole
argument. And it certainly spoils its verbal
consistency. For we unfortunately use this word
ideal indifferently to denote both the institu-
tion which the ideal masks and the mask it-
self, thereby producing desperate confusion of
thought, since the institution may be an effete
and poisonous one, whilst the mask may be,
and indeed generally is, an image of what we
would fain have in its place. If the existing
facts, with their masks on, are to be called
ideals, and the future possibilities which the
masks depict are also to be called ideals — if,
again, the man who is defending existing insti-
tutions by maintaining their identity with their
masks is to be confounded under one name with
the man who is striving to realize the future
possibilities by tearing the mask and the thing
masked asunder, then the position cannot be
intelligibly described by mortal pen : you and I,
reader, will be at cross purposes at every sentence

his luminous wings in vain." (Matthew Arnold, in
his preface to the selection of poems by Byron, dated
1881.)

The 1 88 1 opinion is much sillier than the 1821 opinion.
Further samples will be found in the articles of Henry
Salt, one of the few writers on Shelley who understand his
true position as a social pioneer.

Ideals and Idealists. 27

unless you allow me to distinguish pioneers like
Shelley and Ibsen as realists from the idealists of
my imaginary community of one thousand. If
you ask why I have not allotted the terms the
other way, and called Shelley and Ibsen idealists
and the conventionalists realists, I reply that Ibsen
himself, though he has not formally made the
distinction, has so repeatedly harped on conven-
tions and conventionalists as ideals and idealists
that if I were now perversely to call them
realities and realists, I should confuse readers of
The Wild Duck and RosDiershobn more than I
should help them. Doubtless I shall be re-
proached for puzzling people by thus limiting
the meaning of the term ideal. But what, I
ask, is that inevitable passing perplexity com-
pared to the inextricable tangle I must produce
if I follow the custom, and use the word indis-
criminately in its two violently incompatible
senses ? If the term realist is objected to on
account of some of its modern associations, I can
only recommend you, if you must associate it
with something else than my own description of
its meaning (I do not deal in definitions), to
associate it, not with Zola and Maupassant, but
with Plato.

Now let us return to our community of 700
Philistines, 299 idealists, and t realist. The
mere verbal ambiguity against which I have

28 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

just provided is as nothing beside that which
comes of any attempt to express the relations of
these three sections, simple as they are, in terms
of the ordinary systems of reason and duty.
The ideaHst, higher in the ascent of evolution than
the Philistine, yet hates the highest and strikes
at him with a dread and rancour of which the
easy-going Philistine is guiltless. The man who
has risen above the danger and the fear that his
acquisitiveness will lead him to theft, his temper
to murder, and his affections to debauchery :
this is he who is denounced as an arch-scoundrel
and libertine, and thus confounded with the
lowest because he is the highest. And it is not
the ignorant and stupid who maintain this error,
but the literate and the cultured. When the
true prophet speaks, he is proved to be both
rascal and idiot, not by those who have never
read of how foolishly such learned demonstra-
tions have come off in the past, but by those who
have themselves written volumes on the cruci-
fixions, the burnings, the stonings, the headings
and hangings, the Siberia transportations, the
calumny and ostracism which have been the lot
of the pioneer as well as of the camp follower.
It is from men of established literary reputation
that we learn that William Blake was mad, that
Shelley was spoiled by living in a low set, that
Robert Owen was a man who did not know the

Ideals and Idealists. 29

world, that Ruskin is incapable of comprehending
poHtical economy, that Zola is a mere blackguard,
and that Ibsen is " a Zola with a wooden leg."
The great musician, accepted by the unskilled
listener, is vilified by his fellow-musicians : it was
the musical culture of Europe that pronounced
Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyer-
beer. The great artist finds his foes among the
painters, and not among the men in the street :
it is the Royal Academy which places Mr
Marcus Stone — not to mention Mr Hodgson —
above Mr Burne Jones. It is not rational that
it should be so ; but it is so, for all that. The
realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether,
and sees in them only something to blind us,
something to numb us, something to murder
self in us, something whereby, instead of resist-
ing death, we can disarm it by committing
suicide. The idealist, who has taken refuge
with the ideals because he hates himself and is
ashamed of himself, thinks that all this is so
much the better. The realist, who has come to
have a deep respect for himself and faith in the
validity of his own will, thinks it so much the
worse. To the one, human nature, naturally
corrupt, is only held back from the excesses of
the last years of the Roman empire by self-
denying conformity to the ideals. To the other
these ideals are only swaddling clothes which

30 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

man has outgrown, and which insufferably impede
his movements. No wonder the two cannot
agree. The idealist says, " Realism means
egotism ; and egotism means depravity." The
realist declares that when a man abnegates the
will to live and be free in a world of the living
and free, seeking only to conform to ideals for
the sake of being, not himself, but " a good man,"
then he is morally dead and rotten, and must be
left unheeded to abide his resurrection, if that by
good luck arrive before his bodily death. Un-
fortunately, this is the sort of speech that nobody
but a realist understands. It will be more
amusing as well as more convincing to take an
actual example of an idealist criticising a realist.

III.

THE WOMANLY WOMAN.

EVERYBODY remembers the " Diary of
Marie Bashkirtseff." An outline of it, with
a running commentary, was given in the
Revieiv of Reviezvs (June 1890) by the editor, Mr
WiUiam Stead, a sort of modern JuHan the Apos-
tate, who, having gained an immense following
by a public service in rendering which he had to
perform a realistic feat of a somewhat scandalous
character, entered upon a campaign with the
object of establishing the ideal of sexual
" purity " as a condition of public life. As he
retains his best qualities — faith in himself, wilful-
ness, conscientious unscrupulousness — he can
always make himself heard. Prominent among
his ideals is an ideal of womanliness. In support
of that ideal he will, like all idealists, make and
believe any statement, however obviously and
grotesquely unreal. When he found Marie
Bashkirtseff's account of herself utterly incom-
patible with the account of a woman's mind
given to him by his ideal, he was confronted
with the dilemma that either Marie was not a

32 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

woman or else his ideal did not correspond to
nature. He actually accepted the former alterna-
tive. " Of the distinctively womanly," he says,
"there is in her but little trace. She was the
very antithesis of a true woman." Mr Stead's
next difficulty was, that self-control, being a
leading quality in his ideal, could not have been
possessed by Marie : otherwise she would have
been more like his ideal. Nevertheless he had
to record that she, without any compulsion
from circumstances, made herself a highly skilled
artist by working ten hours a day for six years.
Let anyone who thinks that this is no evi-
dence of self-control just try it for six months.
Mr Stead's verdict nevertheless, was " No self-
control." However, his fundamental quarrel
with Marie came out in the following lines.
" Marie," he said, " was artist, musician, wit,
philosopher, student, anything you like but a
natural woman with a heart to love, and a soul
to find its supreme satisfaction in sacrifice for
lover or for child." Now of all the idealist
abominations that make society pestiferous, I
doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing
self-sacrifice on a woman under pretence that
she likes it ; and, if she ventures to contradict
the pretence, declaring her no true woman. In
India they carried this piece of idealism to the
length of declaring that a wife could not bear to

TJie Womanly Woman. 33

survive her husband, but would be prompted by
her own faithful, loving, beautiful nature to offer
up her life on the pyre which consumed his dead
body. The astonishing thing is that women,
sooner than be branded as unsexed wretches,
allowed themselves to be stupefied with drink,
and in that unwomanly condition burnt alive.
British Philistinism put down widow idealizing
with the strong hand ; and suttee is abolished in
India. The English form of it still survives ;
and Mr Stead, the rescuer of the children, is
one of its high-priests. Imagine his feelings on
coming across this entry in a woman's diary,
" I love myself" Or this, " I swear solemnly
— by the Gospels, by the passion of Christ, by
MYSELF — that in four years I will be famous."
The young woman was positively proposing to
exercise for her own sake all the powers that
were given her, in Mr Stead's opinion, solely
that she might sacrifice them for her lover or
child ! No wonder he is driven to exclaim
again, " She was very clever, no doubt ; but
woman she was not." Now observe this notable
result. Marie Bashkirtseff, instead of being a
less agreeable person than the ordinary female
conformer to the ideal of womanliness, was
conspicuously the reverse. Mr Stead himself
wrote as one infatuated with her mere diary,
and pleased himself by representing her as a
C

34 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

person who fascinated everybody, and was a
source of delight to all about her by the mere
exhilaration and hope-giving atmosphere of her
wilfulness. The truth is, that in real life a self-
sacrificing woman, or, as Mr Stead would put it,
a womanly woman, is not only taken advantage
of, but disliked as well for her pains. No man
pretends that his soul finds its supreme satisfac-
tion in self-sacrifice : such an affectation would
stamp him as a coward and weakling : the
manly man is he who takes the Bashkirtseff
view of himself. But men are not the less loved
on this account. No one ever feels helpless by
the side of the self-helper ; whilst the self-
sacrificer is always a drag, a responsibility, a
reproach, an ev-erlasting and unnatural trouble
with whom no really strong soul can live. Only
those who have helped themselves know how to
help others, and to respect their right to help
themselves.

Although romantic idealists generally insist
on self-surrender as an indispensable element in
true womanly love, its repulsive effect is well-
known and feared in practice by both sexes.
The extreme instance is the reckless self-aban-
donment seen in the infatuation of passionate
sexual desire. Everyone who becomes the object
of that infatuation shrinks from it instinctively.
Love loses its charm when it is not free ; and

The Womanly Woman. 35

whether the compulsion is that of custom and
law, or of infatuation, the effect is the same : it
becomes valueless. The desire to give inspires
no affection unless there is also the power to
withhold ; and the successful wooer, in both
sexes alike, is the one who can stand out for
honourable conditions, and, failing them, go with-
out. Such conditions are evidently not offered
to either sex by the legal marriage of to-day ;
for it is the intense repugnance inspired by the
compulsory character of the legalized conjugal
relation that leads, first to the idealization of mar-
riage whilst it remains indispensable as a means
of perpetuating society ; then to its modification
by divorce and by the abolition of penalties for re-
fusal to comply with judicial orders for restitution
of conjugal rights; and finally to its disuse and
disappearance as the responsibility for the main-
tenance and education of the rising generation
is shifted from the parent to the community.*

■* A dissertation on the anomalies and impossibilities
of the marriage law at its present stage would be too
far out of the main course of my argument to be intro-
duced in the text above ; but it may be well to point
out in passing to those who regard marriage as an in-
violable and inviolate institution, that necessity has
already forced us to tamper with it to such an extent that
at this moment the highest court in the kingdom is face to
face with a husband and wife, the one demanding whether
a woman may saddle him with all the responsibilities of a

36 TJie Quintessence of Ibsemsni.

Although the growing repugnance to face the
Church of England marriage service has led
many celebrants to omit those passages which
frankly explain the object of the institution, we
are not likely to dispense with legal ties and
obligations, and trust wholly to the permanence
of love, until the continuity of society no longer
depends on the private nursery. Love, as a
practical factor in society, is still a mere appetite.
That higher development of it which Ibsen
shews us occurring in the case of Rebecca West
in Rosmersholm is only known to most of us by
the descriptions of great poets, who themselves,
as their biographies prove, have often known it,
not by sustained experience, but only by brief
glimpses. And it is never a first-fruit of their

husband and then refuse to live with him, and the other
asking whether the law allows her husband to commit
abduction, imprisonment and rape upon her. If the court
says Yes to the husband, marriage is made intolerable for
men ; if it says Yes to the wife, marriage is made in-
tolerable for women ; and as this exhausts the possible
alternatives, it is clear that provision must be made for
the dissolution of such marriages if the institution is to be
maintained at all, which it must be until its social function
is otherwise provided for. Marriage is thus, by force of
circumstances, compelled to buy extension of life by
extension of divorce, much as if a fugitive should try to
delay a pursuing wolf by throwing portions of his own
heart to it.

The Womanly Woman. 37

love affairs. Tannhauser may die in the con-
viction that one moment of the emotion he felt
with St Elizabeth was fuller and happier than
all the hours of passion he spent with Venus ;
but that does not alter the fact that love began
for him with Venus, and that its earlier tentatives
towards the final goal were attended with relapses.
Now Tannhiiuser's passion for Venus is a develop-
ment of the humdrum fondness of the bourgeois
Jack for his Gill, a development at once higher
and more dangerous, just as idealism is at once
higher and more dangerous than Philistinism.
The fondness is the germ of the passion : the
passion is the germ of the more perfect love.
When Blake told men that through excess they
would learn moderation, he knew that the way
for the present lay through the Venusberg, and
that the race would assuredly not perish there as
some individuals have, and as the Puritan fears
we all shall unless we find a way round. Also
he no doubt foresaw the time when our children
would be born on the other side of it, and so be
spared that fiery purgation.

But the very facts that Blake is still commonly
regarded as a crazy visionary, and that the
current criticism of RosmersJiolm entirely fails
even to notice the evolution of Rebecca's passion
for Rosmer into her love for him, much more
to credit the moral transfiguration which accom-

38 The Qimitessence of Ihsenisifi.

panics it, shew how absurd it would be to pre-
tend, for the sake of edification, that the ordinary
marriage of to-day is a union between a William
Blake and a Rebecca West, or that it would be
possible, even if it were enlightened policy, to
deny the satisfaction of the sexual appetite to
persons who have not reached that stage. An
overwhelming majority of such marriages as
are not purely de convenance^ are entered into
for the gratification of that appetite either in
its crudest form or veiled only by those ideal-
istic illusions which the youthful imagination
weaves so wonderfully under the stimulus of
desire, and which older people indulgently laugh
at. This being so, it is not surprising that our
society, being directly dominated by men, comes
to regard Woman, not as an end in herself
like Man, but solely as a means of ministering
to his appetite. The ideal wife is one who
does everything that the ideal husband likes,
and nothing else. Now to treat a person as
a means instead of an end is to deny that
person's right to live. And to be treated as a
means to such an end as sexual intercourse with
those who deny one's right to live is insufferable
to any human being. Woman, if she dares face
the fact that she is being so treated, must either
loathe herself or else rebel. As a rule, when
circumstances enable her to rebel successfully —

TJie Womanly Woman. 39

for instance, when the accident of genius enables
her to "lose her character" without losing her
employment or cutting herself off from the society
she values — she does rebel ; but circumstances
seldom do. Docs she then loathe herself? By
no means : she deceives herself in the idealist
fashion by denying that the love which her suitor
offers her is tainted with sexual appetite at all.
It is, she declares, a beautiful, disinterested, pure,
sublime devotion to another by which a man's
life is exalted and purified, and a woman's
rendered blest. And of all the cynics, the
filthiest to her mind is the one who sees, in the
man making honourable proposals to his future
wife, nothing but the human male seeking his
female. The man himself keeps her confirmed
in her illusion ; for the truth is unbearable to
him too : he wants to form an affectionate tie,
and not to drive a degrading bargain. After all,
the germ of the highest love is in them both,
though as yet it is no more than the appetite they
are disguising so carefully from themselves. Con-
sequently every stockbroker who has just brought
his business up to marrying point woos in terms
of the romantic illusion ; and it is agreed between
the two that their marriage shall realize the
romantic ideal. Then comes the breakdown of
the plan. The young wife finds that her husband
is neglecting her for his business ; that his

40 The Quintessence of Ibsenisvi.

interests, his activities, his whole life except that
one part of it to which only a cynic ever referred
before her marriage, lies away from home ; and
that her business is to sit there and mope until
she is wanted. Then what can she do? If she
complains, he, the self-helper, can do without
her ; whilst she is dependent on him for her
position, her livelihood, her place in society, her
home, her name, her very bread. All this is
brought home to her by the first burst of dis-
pleasure her complaints provoke. Fortunately,
things do not remain for ever at this point —
perhaps the most wretched in a woman's life.
The self-respect she has lost as a wife she regains
as a mother, in which capacity her use and im-
portance to the community compare favourably
with those of most men of business. She is
wanted in the house, wanted in the market,
wanted by the children ; and now, instead of
weeping because her husband is away in the
city, thinking of stocks and shares instead of
his ideal woman, she would regard his presence
in the house all day as an intolerable nuisance.
And so, though she is completely disillusioned
on the subject of ideal love, yet, since it has not
turned out so badly after all, she countenances
the illusion still from the point of view that it is
a useful and harmless means of getting boys and
girls to marry and settle down. And this con-

The Womanly Woman. 41

viction is the stronger in her because she feels
that if she had known as much about marriage
the day before her wedding as she did six months
after, it would have been extremely hard to induce
her to get married at all.

This prosaic solution is satisfactory only within
certain limits. It depends altogether upon the
accident of the woman having some natural
vocation for domestic management and the care
of children, as well as on the husband being
fairly good-natured and livable-with. Hence
arises the idealist illusion that a vocation for
domestic management and the care of children
is natural to women, and that women who
lack them are not women at all, but mem-
bers of the third, or Bashkirtseff sex. Even
if this were true, it is obvious that if the
Bashkirtseffs are to be allowed to live, they have
a right to suitable institutions just as much
as men and women. But it is not true.
The domestic career is no more natural to all
women than the military career is natural to
all men ; although it may be necessary that
every able - bodied woman should be called
on to risk her life in childbed just as it
may be necessary that every man should be
called on to risk his life in the battlefield.
It is of course quite true that the majority of
women are kind to children and prefer their

42 The Quintessence of Ibsemsm

own to other people's. But exactly the same
thing is true of the majority of men, who never-
theless do not consider that their proper sphere
is the nursery. The case may be illustrated more
grotesquely by the fact that the majority of
women who have dogs, are kind to them, and
prefer their own dogs to other people's ; yet it is
not proposed that women should restrict their
activities to the rearing of puppies. If we have
come to think that the nursery and the kitchen
are the natural sphere of a woman, we have
done so exactly as English children come to
think that a cage is the natural sphere of a
parrot — because they have never seen one any-
where else. No doubt there are Philistine parrots
who agree with their owners that it is better to
be in a cage than out, so long as there is plenty
of hempseed and Indian corn there. There
may even be idealist parrots who persuade them-
selves that the mission of a parrot is to minister
to the happiness of a private family by whistling
and saying " Pretty Polly," and that it is in the
sacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuit
that a true parrot finds the supreme satisfaction
of its soul. I will not go so far as to affirm
that there are theological parrots who are con-
vinced that imprisonment is the will of God
because it is unpleasant ; but I am confident
that there are rationalist parrots who can demon-

The Womanly Woman. 43

strate that it would be a cruel kindness to let a
parrot out to fall a prey to cats, or at least to
forget its accomplishments and coarsen its natu-
rally delicate fibres in an unprotected struggle
for existence. Still, the only parrot a free-
souled person can sympathize with is the one
that insists on being let out as the first condition
of its making itself agreeable. A selfish bird,
you may say : one that puts its own gratification
before that of the family which is so fond of it
— before even the greatest happiness of the
greatest number : one that, in aping the inde-
pendent spirit of a man, has unparroted itself
and become a creature that has neither the home-
loving nature of a bird nor the strength and
enterprise of a mastiff. All the same, you
respect that parrot in spite of your conclusive
reasoning ; and if it persists, you will have either
to let it out or kill it.

The sum of the matter is that unless Woman
repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her hus-
band, to her children, to society, to the law, and
to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate
herself. But her duty to herself is no duty at
all, since a debt is cancelled when the debtor
and creditor are the same person. Its payment
is simply a fulfilment of the individual will, upon
which all duty is a restriction, founded on the
conception of the will as naturally malign and

44 The Quintessence of Ibsenisvi.

devilish. Therefore Woman has to repudiate
duty altogether. In that repudiation lies her
freedom ; for it is false to say that Woman is
now directly the slave of Man : she is the im-
mediate slave of duty ; and as man's path to
freedom is strewn with the wreckage of the
duties and ideals he has trampled on, so must
hers be. She may indeed mask her iconoclasm
by proving in rationalist fashion, as Man has
often done for the sake of a quiet life, that all
these discarded idealist conceptions will be for-
tified instead of shattered by her emancipation.
To a person with a turn for logic, such proofs
are as easy as playing the piano is to Paderewski.
But it will not be true. A whole basketful of
ideals of the most sacred quality will be smashed
by the achievement of equality for women and
men. Those who shrink from such a clatter and
breakage may comfort themselves with the re-
flection that the replacement of the broken goods
will be prompt and certain. It is always a case
of " The ideal is dead : long live the ideal ! " And
the advantage of the work of destruction is, that
every new ideal is less of an illusion than the
one it has supplanted ; so that the destroyer of
ideals, though denounced as an enemy of society,
is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies.

My digression is now over. Having traversed

The Womanly Wonian. 45

my loop as I promised, and come back to Man's
repudiation of duty by way of Woman's, I may
at last proceed to give some more particular
account of Ibsen's work without further pre-
occupation with Mr Clement Scott's protest, or
the many others of which it is the type. For
we now see that the pioneer must necessarily
provoke such outcry as he repudiates duties,
tramples on ideals, profanes what was sacred,
sanctifies what was infamous, always driving his
plough through gardens of pretty weeds in spite
of the laws made against trespassers for the
protection of the worms which feed on the roots,
letting in light and air to hasten the putrefaction
of decaying matter, and everywhere proclaiming
that " the old beauty is no longer beautiful, the
new truth no longer true." He can do no less ;
and what more and what else he does it is not
given to all of his generation to understand.
And if any man does not understand, and cannot
foresee the harvest, what can he do but cry out
in all sincerity against such destruction, until at
last we come to know the cry of the blind like
any other street cry, and to bear with it as an
honest cry, albeit a false alarm.

IV.

THE PLAYS.

BRAND.

WE are now prepared to learn without mis-
giving that a typical Ibsen play is one
in which the "leading lady" is an un-
womanly woman, and the " villain " an idealist.
It follows that the leading lady is not a heroine
of the Drury Lane type ; nor does the villain
forge or assassinate, since he is a villain by
virtue of his determination to do nothing wrong.
Therefore readers of Ibsen — not playgoers — have
sometimes so far misconceived him as to suppose
that his villains are examples rather than warn-
ings, and that the mischief and ruin which attend
their actions are but the tribulations from which
the soul comes out purified as gold from the
furnace. In fact, the beginning of Ibsen's Euro-
pean reputation was the edification with which
the pious of Scandinavia received his great dra-
matic poem Brand. Brand the priest is an idealist
of heroic earnestness, strength, and courage. He

Brand. 47

declares himself the champion, not of things as
they are, nor of things as they can be made, but
of things as they ought to be. Things as they
ought to be mean for him things as ordered
by men conformed to his ideal of the perfect
Adam, who, again, is not man as he is or can be,
but man conformed to all the ideals — man as it
is his duty to be. In insisting on this conformity,
Brand spares neither himself nor anyone else.
Life is nothing : self is nothing : the perfect
Adam is everything. The imperfect Adam does
not fall in with these views. A peasant whom
he urges to cross a glacier in a fog because it is
his duty to visit his dying daughter, not only
flatly declines, but endeavours forcibly to prevent
Brand from risking his own life. Brand knocks
him clown, and sermonizes him with fierce earnest-
ness and scorn. Presently Brand has to cross a
fiord in a storm to reach a dying man who,
having committed a series of murders, wants
" consolation " from a priest. Brand cannot go
alone : someone must hold the rudder of his boat
whilst he manages the sail. The fisher folk, in
whom the old Adam is strong, do not adopt his
estimate of the gravity of the situation, and re-
fuse to go. A woman, fascinated by his heroism
and idealism, goes. That ends in their marriage,
and in the birth of a child to which they become
deeply attached. Then Brand aspiring from

48 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

height to height of devotion to his ideal, plunges
from depth to depth of murderous cruelty. First
the child must die from the severity of the climate
because Brand must not flinch from the post of
duty and leave his congregation exposed to the
peril of getting an inferior preacher in his place.
Then he forces his wife to give the clothes of the
dead child to a gipsy whose baby needs them.
The bereaved mother does not grudge the gift ;
but she wants to hold back only one little gar-
ment as a relic of her darling. But Brand sees
in this reservation the imperfection of the im-
perfect Eve. He forces her to regard the situa-
tion as a choice between the relic and his ideal.
She sacrifices the relic to the ideal, and then dies,
broken-hearted. Having killed her, and thereby
placed himself beyond ever daring to doubt the
idealism upon whose altar he has immolated her
— having also refused to go to his mother's death-
bed because she compromises with his principles
in disposing of her property, he is hailed by the
people as a saint, and finds his newly built
church too small for his congregation. So he calls
upon them to follow him to worship God in His
own temple, the mountains. After a brief prac-
tical experience of this arrangement, they change
their minds, and stone him. The very mountains
themselves stone him, indeed ; for he is killed by
an avalanche.

Peer Gynt. 49

PEER GYNT.

Brand dies a saint, having caused more in-
tense suffering by his saintliness than the most
talented sinner could possibly have done with
twice his opportunities. Ibsen does not leave
this to be inferred. In another dramatic poem
he gives us an accomplished rascal named Peer
Gynt, an idealist who avoids Brand's errors by
setting up as his ideal the realization of him-
self by the utter satisfaction of his own will.
In this he would seem to be on the path to
which Ibsen himself points ; and indeed all
who know the two plays will agree that whether
or no it was better to be Peer Gynt than Brand,
it was beyond all question better to be the
mother or the sweetheart of Peer, scapegrace
and liar as he was, than mother or wife to the
saintly Brand. Brand would force his ideal on
all men and women : Peer Gynt keeps his ideal
for himself alone : it is indeed implicit in the
ideal itself that it should be unique — that he
alone should have the force to realize it. For
Peer's first boyish notion of the self-realized
man is not the saint, but the demigod whose in-
domitable will is stronger than destiny, the
fighter, the master, the man whom no woman
can resist, the mighty hunter, the knight of a
thousand adventures, — the model, in short, of
D

50 The Quintessence of Ihsenisnt.

the lover in a lady's novel, or the hero in a
boy's romance. Now, no such person exists,
or ever did exist, or ever can exist. The man
who cultivates an indomitable will and refuses to
make way for anything or anybody, soon finds
that he cannot hold a street crossing against a
tram car, much less a world against the whole
human race. Only by plunging into illusions to
which every fact gives the lie can he persuade
himself that his will is a force that can overcome
all other forces, or that it is less conditioned by
circumstances than is a wheelbarrow. However,
Peer Gynt, being imaginative enough to conceive
his ideal, is also imaginative enough to find
illusions to hide its unreality, and to persuade
himself that Peer Gynt, the shabby countryside
loafer, is Peer Gynt, Emperor of Himself, as he
writes over the door of his hut in the mountains.
His hunting feats are invented ; his military
genius has no solider foundation than a street
fight with a smith ; and his reputation as an adven-
turous daredevil he has to gain by th£ bravado
of carrying off the bride from a wedding at which
the guests snub him. Only in the mountains
can he enjoy his illusions undisturbed by ridicule :
yet even in the mountains he finds obstacles
which he cannot force his way through, obstacles
which withstand him as spirits with voices, tell-
ing him that he must go round. But he will

Peer Gynt. 51

not : he will go forward : he will cut his path
sword in hand, in spite of fate. All the same,
he has to go round ; for the world-will is
without Peer Gynt as well as within him.
Then he tries the supernatural, only to find that
it means nothing more than the transmogrifying
of squalid realities by lies and pretences. Still,
like our amateurs of thaumaturgy, he is willing
to enter into a conspiracy of make-believe up to
a certain point. When the Trold king's daughter
appears as a repulsive ragged creature riding on
a pig, he is ready to accept her as a beautiful
princess on a noble steed, on condition that she
accepts his mother's tumble-down farmhouse,
with the broken window panes stopped up with
old clouts, as a splendid castle. He will go with
her among the Trolds, and pretend that the grue-
some ravine in which they hold their orgies is a
glorious palace ; he will partake of their filthy
food and declare it nectar and ambrosia ; he will
applaud their obscene antics as exquisite dancing,
and their discordant din as divine music ; but
when they finally propose to slit his eyes so that
he may see and hear these things, not as they
are, but as he has been pretending to see and
hear them, he draws back, resolved to be himself
even in self-deception. He leaves the moun-
tains and becomes a prosperous man of business
in America, highly respectable and ready for

52 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

any profitable speculation — slave trade, Bible
trade, whisky trade, missionary trade, anything !
In this phase he takes to piety, and persuades
himself, like Mr Stanley, that he is under the
special care of God. This opinion is shaken by
an adventure in which he is marooned on the
African coast ; and it is not restored until the
treacherous friends who marooned him are de-
stroyed before his eyes by the blowing-up of the
steam yacht they have just stolen from him,
when he utters his celebrated exclamation, " Ah,
God is a Father to me after all ; but economical
he certainly is not." He finds a white horse
in the desert, and is accepted on its account as
the Messiah by an Arab tribe, a success which
moves him to declare that now at last he is
really worshipped for himself, whereas in Ame-
rica people only respected his breast-pin, the
symbol of his money. In commerce, too, he
reflects, his eminence was a mere matter of
chance, whilst as a prophet he is eminent by
pure natural fitness for the post. This is ended
by his falling in love with a dancing-girl, who,
after leading him into every sort of undignified
and ludicrous extravagance, ranging from his
hailing her as the Eternal-Feminine of Goethe to
the more practical folly of giving her his white
horse and all his prophetic finery, runs away with
the spoil, and leaves him once more helpless and

Peer Gynt. 53

alone in the desert. He wanders until he comes
to the great Sphinx, beside which he finds a
German gentleman in great perplexity as to who
the Sphinx is. Peer Gynt, seeing in that im-
passive, immovable, majestic figure, a symbol of
his own ideal, is able to tell the German gentle-
man at once that the Sphinx is itself. This
explanation dazzles the German, who, after some
further discussion of the philosophy of self-
realization, invites Peer Gynt to accompany him
to a club of learned men in Cairo, who are ripe
for enlightenment on this very question. Peer,
delighted, accompanies the German to the club,
which turns out to be a madhouse in which the
lunatics have broken loose and locked up their
keepers. It is in this madhouse, and by these
madmen, that Peer Gynt is at last crowned
Emperor of Himself He receives their homage
as he lies in the dust fainting with terror.

As an old man, Peer Gynt, returning to the
scenes of his early adventures, is troubled with
the prospect of meeting a certain button moulder
who threatens to make short work of his realized
self by melting it down into buttons in his
crucible with a heap of other button-material.
Immediately the old exaltation of the self-realizer
is changed into an unspeakable dread of the
button-moulder Death, to avoid whom Peer
Gynt will commit any act, even to pushing a

54 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

drowning man from the spar he is cHnging to in
a shipwreck lest it should not suffice to support
two. At last he finds a deserted sweetheart of
his youth still waiting for him and still believing
in him. In the imagination of this old woman
he finds the ideal Peer Gynt ; whilst in himself,
the loafer, the braggart, the confederate of sham
magicians, the Charleston speculator, the false
prophet, the dancing-girl's dupe, the bedlam
emperor, the selfish thruster of the drowning man
into the waves, there is nothing heroic — nothing
but commonplace self-seeking and shirking,
cowardice and sensuality, veiled only by the
romantic fancies of the born liar. With this
crowningly unreal realization he is left to face the
button-moulder as best he can.

Peer Gynt has puzzled a good many people by
Ibsen's fantastic and subtle treatment of its
thesis. It is so far a difficult play, that the ideal
of unconditional self-realization, however familiar
its suggestions may be to the ambitious reader,
is not at all understood by him, much less for-
mulated as a proposition in metaphysics. When
it is stated to him by some one who does under-
stand it, he unhesitatingly dismisses it as idiotic ;
and it is because he is perfectly right in doing
so — because it is idiotic in the most accurate
sense of the term — that he finds such difficulty
in recognizing it as the common ideal of his

Peer Gynt. 55

own prototype, the pushing, competitive, success-
loving man who is the hero of the modern world.
There is nothing novel in Ibsen's dramatic
method of reducing these ideals to absurdity.
Exactly as Cervantes took the old ideal of
chivalry, and shewed what came of a man attempt-
ing to act as if it were real, so Ibsen takes the
ideals of Brand and Peer Gynt, and treats them
in the very same manner. Don Quixote acts as
if he were a perfect knight in a world of giants and
distressed damsels instead of a country gentle-
man in a land of innkeepers and farm wenches ;
Brand acts as if he were the perfect Adam in a
world where, by resolute rejection of all com-
promise with imperfection, it was immediately
possible to change the rainbow " bridge between
flesh and spirit " into as enduring a structure as
the tower of Babel was intended to be, thereby
restoring man to the condition in which he
walked with God in the garden ; and Peer Gynt
tries to act as if he had in him a special force
that could be concentrated so as to prevail
over all other forces. They ignore the real —
ignore what they are and where they are, not
only, like Nelson, shutting their eyes to the
signals that a brave man may disregard, but in-
sanely steering straight on the rocks that no
resolution can prevail against. Observe that
neither Cervantes nor Ibsen is incredulous, in the

$6 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

Philistine way, as to the power of ideals over
men. Don Quixote, Brand, and Peer Gynt are,
all three, men of action seeking to realize their
ideals in deeds. However ridiculous Don Quix-
ote makes himself, you cannot dislike or despise
him, much less think that it would have been
better for him to have been a Philistine like
Sancho ; and Peer Gynt, selfish rascal as he is,
is not unlovable. Brand, made terrible by the
consequences of his idealism to others, is heroic.
Their castles in the air are more beautiful than
castles of brick and mortar ; but one cannot live
in them ; and they seduce men into pretending
that every hovel is such a castle, just as Peer
Gynt pretended that the Trold king's den was a
palace.

EMPEROR AND GALILEAN.
When Ibsen, by merely giving the rein to the
creative impulse of his poetic nature, had pro-
duced Bi'and and Peer Gynt, he was nearly forty.
His will, in setting his imagination to work, had
produced a great puzzle for his intellect. In no
case does the difference between the will and the
intellect come out more clearly than in that of
the poet, save only that of the lover. Had Ibsen
died in 1867, he, like many another great poet,
would have gone to his grave without having
ever rationally understood his own meaning.

Emperor and Galilean. 57

Nay, if in that year an intellectual expert — a
commentator, as we call him — had gone to Ibsen
and offered him the explanation of Brand which
he himself must have arrived at before he con-
structed Ghosts and The Wild Duck, he would
perhaps have repudiated it with as much disgust
as a maiden would feel if anyone were brutal
enough to give her the physiological rationale of
her dreams of meeting a fairy prince. It is
only the naif who goes to the creative artist with
absolute confidence in receiving an answer to
his " What does this passage mean ? " That is
the very question which the poet's own intellect,
which had no part in the conception of the poem,
may be asking him. And this curiosity of the
intellect — this restless life in it which differen-
tiates it from dead machinery, and which troubles
our lesser artists but little, is one of the marks
of the greater sort. Shakespear, in Hamlet, made
a drama of the self-questioning that came upon
him when his intellect rose up in alarm, as well
it might, against the vulgar optimism of his Henry
F., and yet could mend it to no better purpose
than by the equally vulgar pessimism of Troilus
and Cressida, Dante took pains to understand
himself: so did Goethe. Richard Wagner, one
of the greatest poets of our own day, has left us
as many volumes of criticism of art and life as
he has left musical scores ; and he has expressly

5 8 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

described how the intellectual activity which he
brought to the analysis of his music dramas was
in abeyance during their creation. Just so do
we find Ibsen, after composing his two great dra-
matic poems, entering on a struggle to become
intellectually conscious of what he had done.

We have seen that with Shakespear such an
effort became itself creative and produced a
drama of questioning. With Ibsen the same
thing occurred : he harked back to an abandoned
project of his, and wrote two huge dramas on the
subject of the apostasy of the Emperor Julian.
In this work we find him at first preoccupied
with a piece of old-fashioned freethinking — the
dilemma that moral responsibility presupposes
free-will, and that free-will sets man above God.
Cain, who slew because he willed, willed because
he must, and must have willed to slay because
he was himself, comes upon the stage to claim
that murder is fertile, and death the ground of
life, though he cannot say what is the ground
of death. Judas, who betrayed under the same
necessity, wants to know whether, since the
Master chose him, he chose him foreknowingly.
This part of the drama has no very deep signi-
ficance. It is easy to invent conundrums which
dogmatic evangelicalism cannot answer ; and no
doubt, whilst it was still a nine days' wonder that
evangelicalism could not solve all enigmas, such

Emperor and Galilean. 59

invention seemed something much deeper than
the mere intellectual chess-play which it is seen
to be now that the nine days are past. In his
occasional weakness for such conundrums, and
later on in his harping on the hereditary trans-
mission of disease, we see Ibsen's active intellect
busy, not only with the problems peculiar to his
own plays, but with the fatalism and pessimism
of the middle of our century, when the typical
advanced culture was attainable by reading
Strauss's Leben Jesu, the popularizations of
Helmholtz and Darwin by Tyndall and Hux-
ley, and George Eliot's novels, vainly protested
against by Ruskin as peopled with " the sweep-
ings of a Pentonville omnibus." The traces of
this period in Ibsen's writings show how well he
knew the crushing weight with which the sordid
cares of the ordinary struggle for money and
respectability fell on the world when the romance
of the creeds was discredited, and progress
seemed for the moment to mean, not the growth
of the spirit of man, but an effect of the sur-
vival of the fittest brought about by the destruc-
tion of the unfit, all the most frightful examples
of this systematic destruction being thrust into
the utmost prominence by those who were fight-
ing the Church with Mill's favourite dialectical
weapon, the incompiatibility of divine omnipo-
tence with divine benevolence. His plays are

6o The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

full of evidence of his overwhelming sense of
the necessity for rousing the individual into
self-assertion against this numbing fatalism;
and yet he never seems to have freed his
intellect wholly from an acceptance of its scien-
tific validity. That it only accounted for pro-
gress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous
increase in the severity of the conditions of
existence, — that is, on an assumption of just the
reverse of what was actually taking place —
appears to have escaped Ibsen as completely
as it has escaped Professor Huxley himself It
is true that he did not allow himself to be
stopped by this gloomy fortress of pessimism
and materialism : his genius pushed him past
it, but without intellectually reducing it ; and
the result is, that as far as one can guess, he
believes to this day that it is impregnable, not
dreaming that it has been demolished, and that
too with ridiculous ease, by the mere march
behind him of the working class, which, by its
freedom from the characteristic bias of the middle
classes, has escaped their characteristic illusions,
and solved many of the enigmas which they
found insoluble because they wished to find them
so. His prophetic belief in the spontaneous
growth of the will makes him a meliorist with-
out reference to the operation of natural selec-
tion ; but his impression of the light thrown by

Emperor and Galilean. 6i

physical and biological science on the facts of
life seems to be the gloomy one of the period
at which he must have received his education in
these departments. External nature often plays
her most ruthless and destructive part in his
works, which have an extraordinary fascination
for the pessimists of that school, in spite of the
incompatibility of his individualism with that
mechanical utilitarian ethic of theirs which treats
Man as the sport of every circumstance, and
ignores his will altogether.

Another inessential but very prominent feature
in Ibsen's dramas will be understood easily by
anyone who has observed how a change of re-
ligious faith intensifies our concern about our
own salvation. An ideal, pious or secular, is
practically used as a standard of conduct ; and
whilst it remains unquestioned, the simple rule
of right is to conform to it. In the theological
stage, when the Bible is accepted as the reve-
lation of God's will, the pious man, when in
doubt as to whether he is acting rightly or
wrongly, quiets his migivings by searching the
Scripture until he finds a text which endorses
his action.* The rationalist, for whom the Bible

■* As such misgivings seldom arise except when the
conscience revolts against the contemplated action, an
appeal to Scripture to justify a point of conduct is gene-
rally found in practice to be an attempt to excuse a crime.

62 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

has no authority, brings his conduct to such
tests as asking himself, after Kant, how it would
be if everyone did as he proposes to do ; or
by calculating the effect of his action on the
greatest happiness of the greatest number ; or
by judging whether the liberty of action he is
claiming infringes the equal liberty of others,
&c. &c. Most men are ingenious enough to
pass examinations of this kind successfully in
respect to everything they really want to do.
But in periods of transition, as, for instance,
when faith in the infallibility of the Bible is
shattered, and faith in that of reason not yet
perfected, men's uncertainty as to the right-
ness and wrongness of their actions keeps them
in a continual perplexity, amid which casuistry
seems the most important branch of intellectual
activity. Life, as depicted by Ibsen, is very
full of it. We find the great double drama of
Emperor and Galilean occupied at first with
Julian's case regarded as a case of conscience.
It is compared, in the manner already described,
with the cases of Cain and Judas, the three
men being introduced as "corner stones under
the wrath of necessity," "great freedmen under
necessity," and so forth. The qualms of Julian
are theatrically effective in producing the most
exciting suspense as to whether he will dare
to choose between Christ and the imperial purple ;

Emperor and Galilean. 63

but the mere exhibition of a man struggling
between his ambition and his creed belongs to a
phase of intellectual interest which Ibsen had
passed even before the production of Brandy
when he wrote his Kongs Emnerne or The Pre-
tenders. Emperor and Galilea7i might have been
appropriately, if prosaically, named The Mistake
of Maximns the Mystic. It is Maximus who
forces the choice on Julian, not as between
ambition and principle — between Paganism and
Christianity — between " the old beauty that is
no longer beautiful and the new truth that is no
longer true," but between Christ and Julian
himself. Maximus knows that there is no going
back to " the first empire " of pagan sensual-
ism. " The second empire," Christian or self-
abnegatory idealism, is already rotten at heart.
" The third empire " is what he looks for — the
empire of Man asserting the eternal validity
of his own will. He who can see that not on
Olympus, not nailed to the cross, but in him-
self is God : he is the man to build Brand's
bridge between the flesh and the spirit, establish-
ing this third empire in which the spirit shall
not be unknown, nor the flesh starved, nor the
will tortured and baffled. Thus throughout the
first part of the double drama we have Julian
prompted step by step to the stupendous convic-
tion that he and not the Galilean is God. His

64 The Qiiintesse)ice of Ibsenism.

final resolution to seize the throne is expressed
in his interruption of the Lord's prayer, which he
hears intoned by worshippers in church as he
wrestles in the gloom of the catacombs with his
own fears and the entreaties and threats of his
soldiers urging him to take the final decisive
step. At the cue " Lead us not into temptation ;
but deliver us from evil " he rushes to the church
with his soldiers, exclaiming " For mine is the
kingdom." Yet he halts on the threshold, dazzled
by the light, as his follower Sallust points the
declaration by adding, — *' and the kingdom, and
the power, and the glory."

Once on the throne Julian becomes a mere
pedant-tyrant, trying to revive Paganism mecha-
nically by cruel enforcement of external confor-
mity to its rites. In his moments of exaltation
he half grasps the meaning of Maximus, only to
relapse presently and pervert it into a grotesque
mixture of superstition and monstrous vanity.
We have him making such speeches as this,
worthy of Peer Gynt at his most ludicrous.
" Has not Plato long ago enunciated the truth
that only a god can rule over men ? What did
he mean by that saying? Answer me: what
did he mean ? Far be it from me to assert that
Plato — incomparable sage though he was — had
any individual, even the greatest, in his prophetic
eye," &c. In this frame of mind Christ appears

Emperor and Galilean. 65

to him, not as the prototype of himself, as
Maximus would have him feel, but as a rival god
over whom he must prevail at all costs. It galls
him to think that the Galilean still reigns in the
hearts of men whilst the emperor can only extort
lip honour from them by brute force ; for in his
wildest excesses of egotism he never so loses
his saving sense of the realities of things as to
mistake the trophies of persecution for the fruits
of faith. " Tell me who shall conquer," he
demands of Maximus, " — the emperor or the
Galilean?"

" Both the emperor and the Galilean shall
succumb," says Maximus. "Whether in our
time or in hundreds of years I know not ; but
so it shall be when the right man comes."

"Who is the right man?" says Julian.

" He who shall swallow up both emperor and
Galilean," replies the seer. " Both shall succumb ;
but you shall not therefore perish. Does not the
child succumb in the youth and the youth in the
man : yet neither child nor youth perishes. You
know I have never approved of your policy as
emperor. You have tried to make the youth a
child again. The empire of the flesh is fallen a
prey to the empire of the spirit. But the empire
of the spirit is not final, any more than the youth
is. You have tried to hinder the youth from
growing — from becoming a man. Oh fool, who
E

66 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

have drawn your sword against that which is to
be — against the third empire, in which the twin-
natured shall reign. For him the Jews have a
name. They call him Messiah, and are waiting
for him."

Still Julian stumbles on the threshold of the
idea without entering into it. He is galled out
of all comprehension by the rivalry of the
Galilean, and asks despairingly who shall break
his power. Then Maximus drives the lesson
home.

Maximus. — Is it not written, " Thou shalt have none
other gods but me " ?

Julian. — Yes— yes — yes.

Maximus. — The seer of Nazareth did not preach this
god or that : he said " God is I : I am God."

Julian.— And that is what makes the emperor power-
less. The third empire ? The Messiah ? Not the Jews'
Messiah, but the Messiah of the two empires, the spirit
and the world — ?

Maximus. — The God-Emperor.

Julian. — The Emperor-God.

Maximus. — Logos in Pan, Pan in Logos.

Julian. — How is he begotten t

Maximus. — He is self-begotten in the man who wills.

But it is of no use. Maximus's idea is a syn-
thesis of relations in which not only is Christ
God in exactly the same sense as that in which
Julian is God, but Julian is Christ as well. The
persistence of Julian's jealousy of the Galilean
shews that he has not comprehended the syn-

Emperor and Galilean. 6y

thesis at all, but only seized on that part of it
which flatters his own egotism. And since this
part is only valid as a constituent of the syn-
thesis, and has no reality when isolated from it,
it cannot by itself convince Julian. In vain does
Maximus repeat his lesson in every sort of
parable, and in such pregnant questions as
" How do you know, Julian, that you were not
in him whom you now persecute ? " He can
only wreak him to utter commands to the winds,
and to exclaim, in the excitement of burning his
fleet on the borders of Persia, " The third empire
is here, Maximus. I feel that the Messiah of the
earth lives within me. The spirit has become
flesh and the flesh spirit. All creation lies within
my will and power. More than the fleet is
burning. In that glowing, swirling pyre the
crucified Galilean is burning to ashes ; and the
earthly emperor is burning with the Galilean.
But from the ashes shall arise, phoenix-like, the
God of earth and the Emperor of the spirit in
one, in one, in one." At which point he is in-
formed that the Persian refugee whose informa-
tion has emboldened him to burn his ships, has
fled from the camp and is a manifest spy. From
that moment he is a broken man. In his next
and last emergency, when the Persians fall upon
his camp, his first desperate exclamation is a vow
to sacrifice to the gods. " To what gods, oh

68 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

fool ? " cries Maximus. " Where are they ; and
what are they ? " "I will sacrifice to this god
and that god — I will sacrifice to many," he
answers desperately. " One or other must surely
hear me. / must call on sonie'Jiing zvitJiout me
and above me'' A Hash of lightning seems to him
a response from above ; and with this encourage-
ment he throws himself into the fight, clinging,
like Macbeth, to an ambiguous oracle which leads
him to suppose that only in the Phrygian regions
need he fear defeat. He imagines he sees the
Nazarene in the ranks of the enemy ; and in
fighting madly to reach him he is struck down,
in the name of Christ, by one of his own soldiers.
Then his one Christian general, Jovian, calls on
his " believing brethren " to give Cresar what is
Caesar's. Declaring that the heavens are open
and the angels coming to the rescue with their
swords of fire, he rallies the Galileans of whom
Julian has made slave-soldiers. The pagan free
legions, crying out that the god of the Galileans
is on the Roman side, and that he is the
strongest, follow Jovian as he charges the enemy,
who fly in all directions whilst Julian, sinking
back from a vain effort to rise, exclaims, " Thou
hast conquered, oh Galilean."

Julian dies quietly in his tent, averring, in
reply to a Christian friend's inquiry, that he has
nothing to repent of " The power which circum-

Emperor and Galilean. 6g

stances placed in my hands," he says, "and
which is an emanation of divinity, I am con-
scious of having used to the best of my skill. I
have never wittingly wronged anyone. If some
should think that I have not fulfilled all expecta-
tions, they should in justice reflect that there is a
mysterious pov/er outside us, which in a great
measure governs the issue of human undertak-
ings." He still does not see eye to eye with
Maximus, though there is a flash of insight in his
remark to him, when he learns that the village
where he fell is called the Phrygian region, that
" the world-will has laid an ambush for him."
It was something for Julian to have seen that
the power which he found stronger than his
individual will was itself will ; but inasmuch as
he conceived it, not as the whole of which his
will was but a part, but as a rival will, he was
not the man to found the third empire. He had
felt the godhead in himself, but not in others.
Being only able to say, with half conviction,
" The kingdom of heaven is within ME," he
had been utterly vanquished by the Galilean
who had been able to say, " The kingdom of
heaven is within YOU." But he was on the
way to that full truth. A man cannot believe
in others until he believes in himself; for his
conviction of the equal worth of his fellows must
be filled by the overflow of his conviction of his

70 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

own worth. Against the spurious Christianity
of asceticism, starving that indispensable prior
conviction, JuHan rightly rebelled ; and Maximus
rightly incited him to rebel. But Maximus
could not fill the prior conviction even to fulness,
much less to overflowing ; for the third empire
was not yet, and is not yet. Still the tyrant dies
with a peaceful conscience ; and Maximus is
able to tell the priest at the bedside that the
world-will shall answer for Julian's soul. What
troubles the mystic is his having misled Julian
by encouraging him to bring upon himself the
fate of Cain and Judas. As water can be boiled
by fire, man can be prompted and stimulated
from without to assert his individuality ; but just
as no boiling can fill a half-empty well, no
external stimulus can enlarge the spirit of man
to the point at which he can self-beget the
Emperor-God in himself by willing. At that
point " to will is to have to will " ; and it is with
these words on his lips that Maximus leaves the
stage, still sure that the third empire is to come.
It is not necessary to translate the scheme of
Emperor and Galilean into terms of the anti-
thesis between idealism and realism. Julian,
in this respect, is a reincarnation of Peer Gynt.
All the difference is that the subject which was
instinctively projected in the earlier poem, is
intellectually constructed as well in the later

Emperor and Galilean. 71

history, Julian plus Maximus the Mystic being
Peer plus one who understands him better than
Ibsen did when he created him. The current
interest of Ibsen's interpretation of original
Christianity is obvious. The deepest sayings
recorded in the gospels are now nothing but
eccentric paradoxes to most of those who reject
the superstitious view of Christ's divinity. Those
who accept that view often consider that such
acceptance absolves them from attaching any
sensible meaning to his words at all, and so
might as well pin their faith to a stock or stone.
Of these attitudes the first is superficial, and the
second stupid. Ibsen's interpretation, whatever
may be its validity, will certainly hold the field
long after the current " Crosstianity," as it has
been aptly called, becomes unthinkable.

Ibsen had now written three immense dramas,
all dealing with the effect of idealism on in-
dividual egotists of exceptional imaginative
excitability. This he was able to do whilst his
intellectual consciousness of his theme was yet
incomplete, by simply portraying sides of him-
self. He has put himself into the skin of Brand,
of Peer Gynt, and of Julian ; and these figures
have accordingly a certain direct vitality which
belongs to none of his subsequent creations of
the male sex. There are flashes of it in Rell-

72 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

ing, in Lovborg, in Ellida's stranger from the
sea ; but they are only flashes : henceforth all
his really vivid and solar figures are women.
For, having at last completed his intellectual
analysis of idealism, he could now construct
methodical illustrations of its social working, in-
stead of, as before, blindly projecting imaginary
personal experiences which he himself had not
yet succeeded in interpreting. Further, now that
he understood the matter, he could see plainly the
effect of idealism as a social force on people quite
unlike himself : that is to say, on everyday people
in everyday life — on shipbuilders, bank man-
agers, parsons, and doctors, as well as on saints,
romantic adventurers, and emperors. With his
eyes thus opened, instances of the mischief of
idealism crowded upon him so rapidly that he
began deliberately to inculcate their moral by
writing realistic prose plays of modern life, aban-
doning all production of art for art's sake. His
skill as a playwright and his genius as an artist
were thenceforth used only to secure attention
and effectiveness for his detailed attack on
idealism. No more verse, no more tragedy for
the sake of tears or comedy for the sake of
laughter, no more seeking to produce specimens
of art forms in order that literary critics might
fill the public belly with the east wind. The
critics, it is true, soon declared that he had

The League of Youth. y^

ceased to be an artist ; but he, having something
else to do with his talent than to fulfil critics'
definitions, took no notice of them, not thinking
their ideal sufficiently important to write a play
about.

THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH.

The first of the series of realistic prose plays
is called Pillars of Society ; but before describ-
ing this, a word must be said about a previous
work which seems to have determined the form
which the later series took. Between Peer Gynt
and Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen had let fall an
amusing comedy called The League of Youth
{De Unges Forbund) in which the imaginative
egotist reappears farcically as an ambitious
young lawyer-politician who, smarting under a
snub from a local landowner and county mag-
nate, relieves his feelings with such a passionate
explosion of Radical eloquence that he is cheered
to the echo by the progressive party. Intoxi-
cated with this success, he imagines himself a
great leader of the people and a wielder of the
mighty engine of democracy. He narrates to a
friend a dream in which he saw kings swept
helplessly over the surface of the earth by a
mighty wind. He has hardly achieved this im-
promptu when he receives an invitation to dine
with the local magnate, whose friends, to spare

74 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

his feelings, have misled him as to the person
aimed at in the new demagogue's speech. The
invitation sets the egotist's imagination on the
opposite tack : he is presently pouring forth
his soul in the magnate's drawing-room to the
very friend to whom he related the great dream.
" My goal is this : in the course of time I shall get into
Parliament, pediaps into the Ministry, and marry happily
into a rich and honourable family. I intend to reach it by
my own exertions. I must and shall reach it without help
from anyone. Meanwhile I shall enjoy life here, drink-
ing in beauty and sunshine. Here there are fine manners :
life moves gracefully here : the very floors seem laid to be
trodden only by lacquered shoes : the arm chairs are deep ;
and the ladies sink exquisitely into them. Here the con-
versation goes lightly and elegantly, like a game at battle-
dore ; and no blunders come plumping in to make an
awkward silence. Here I feel for the first time what dis-
tinction means. Yes : we have indeed an aristocracy of
culture ; and to it I will belong. Dont you yourself feel
the refining influence of the place," &c. &c.

For the rest, the play is an ingenious comedy
of intrigue, clever enough in its mechanical con-
struction to entitle the French to claim that
Ibsen owes something to his technical education
as a playwright in the school of Scribe, although
it is hardly necessary to add that the difference
between The League of Youth and the typical
'* well made play " of Scribe is like the difference
between a human being and a marionette. One
or two episodes in the last two acts contain the

Pillars of Society. 75

germs of later plays ; and it was the suitability
of the realistic prose comedy form to these
episodes that no doubt confirmed Ibsen in his
choice of it. Therefore The League of Youth
would stand as the first of the realistic plays in
any classification which referred to form alone.
In a classification by content, with which we are
here alone concerned, it must stand in its
chronological place as a farcical member of the
group of heroic plays beginning with The Pre-
tenders and ending with Emperor and Galilean.

PILLARS OF SOCIETY.
Pillars of Society^ then, is the first play in
which Ibsen writes as one who has intellectually
mastered his own didactic purpose, and no longer
needs to project himself into his characters. It
is the history of one Karsten Bernick, a " pillar of
society " who, in pursuance of the duty of main-
taining the respectability of his father's famous
firm of shipbuilders (to shatter which would be
to shatter one of the ideals of commercial society
and to bring abstract respectability into dis-
repute), has averted a disgraceful exposure by
allowing another man to bear the discredit not
only of a love affair in which he himself had
been the sinner, but of a theft which was never
committed at all, having been merely alleged as
an excuse for the firm being out of funds at a

y6 The Quintesse7tce of Ibsenisni.

critical period. Bernick is an abject slave to the
idealizings of a certain schoolmaster Rorlund
about respectability, duty to society, good exam-
ple, social influence, health of the community,
and so on. When he falls in love with a married
actress, he feels that no man has a right to
shock the feelings of Rorlund and the commu-
nity for his own selfish gratification ? However,
a clandestine intrigue will shock nobody, since
nobody need know of it. He accordingly adopts
this method of satisfying himself and preserving
the moral tone of the community at the same
time. Unluckily, the intrigue is all but dis-
covered ; and Bernick has either to see the
moral security of the community shaken to its
foundations by the terrible scandal of his ex-
posure, or else to deny what he did and put
it on another man. As the other man happens
to be going to America, where he can easily
conceal his imputed shame, Bernick's conscience
tells him that it would be little short of a
crime against society to neglect such an oppor-
tunity ; and he accordingly lies his way back
into the good opinion of Rorlund and company
at the emigrant's expense. There are three
women in the play for whom the schoolmaster's
ideals have no attractions. First, there is the
actress's daughter, who wants to get to America
because she hears that people there are not good ;

Pillars of Society. 77

and she is heartily tired of good people, since it
is part of their goodness to look down on her
because of her mother's disgrace. The school-
master, to whom she is engaged, condescends
to her for the same reason. The second has
already sacrified her happiness and wasted her
life in conforming to Mr Stead's ideal of woman-
liness ; and she earnestly advises the younger
woman not to commit that folly, but to break
her engagement with the schoolmaster, and
elope promptly with the man she loves. The
third is a naturally free woman who has
snapped her fingers at the current ideals all her
life ; and it is her presence that at last encourages
the liar to break with the ideals by telling the
truth about himself The comic personage of
the piece is a useless hypochondriac whose
function in life, as described by himself, is " to
hold up the banner of the ideal." This he does
by sneering at everything and everybody for not
resembling the heroic incidents and characters
he reads about in novels and tales of adventure.
But in his obvious peevishness and folly,
he is much less dangerous than the pious
idealist, the earnest and respectable Rorlund.
The play concludes with Bernick's admission
that the spirits of Truth and Freedom are the
true pillars of society, a phrase which sounds so
like an idealistic commonplace that it is necessary

yS The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

to add that Truth in this passage does not mean
the nursery convention of truth-telling satirized
by Ibsen himself in a later play, as well as by
Labiche and other comic dramatists. It means
the unflinching recognition of facts, and the
abandonment of the conspiracy to ignore such
of them as do not bolster up the ideals. The
idealist rule as to truth dictates the recogni-
tion only of those facts or idealistic masks of
facts which have a respectable air, and the
mentioning of these on all occasions and at all
hazards. Ibsen urges the recognition of all
facts ; but as to mentioning them, he wrote a
whole play, as we shall see presently, to shew
that you must do that at your own peril, and
that a truth-teller who cannot hold his tongue on
occasion may do as much mischief as a whole
university full of trained liars. The word
Freedom, I need hardly say, means freedom
from slavery to the Rorlund ideals.

A DOLL'S HOUSE.

Unfortunately, Pillars of Society, as a pro-
pagandist play, is disabled by the circumstance
that the hero, being a fraudulent hypocrite in
the ordinary police-court sense of the phrase, is
not accepted as a typical pillar of society by the
class which he represents. Accordingly, Ibsen
took care next time to make his idealist irre-

A DolVs House. 79

proachable from the standpoint of the ordinary
idealist moraHty. In the famous DolFs House,
the pillar of society who owns the doll is a
model husband, father, and citizen. In his little
household, with the three darling children and
the affectionate little wife, all on the most loving
terms with one another, we have the sweet home,
the womanly woman, the happy family life of the
idealist's dream. Mrs Nora Helmer is happy in
the belief that she has attained a valid realiza-
tion of all these illusions — that she is an ideal
wife and mother, and that Helmer is an ideal
husband who would, if the necessity arose, give
his life to save her reputation. A {g.\v simply
contrived incidents disabuse her effectually on all
these points. One of her earliest acts of devo-
tion to her husband has been the secret raising
of a sum of money to enable him to make a tour
which was necessary to restore his health. As
he would have broken down sooner than go into
debt, she has had to persuade him that the money
was a gift from her father. It was really obtained
from a moneylender, who refused to make her
the loan unless she induced her father to endorse
the promissory note. This being impossible, as
her father was dying at the time, she took the
shortest way out of the difficulty by writing the
name herself, to the entire satisfaction of the
moneylender, who, though not at all duped,

8o TJie Quintessence of Ibse?zism.

knows that forged bills are often the surest to be
paid. Then she slaves in secret at scrivener's
work until she has nearly paid off the debt. At
this point Helmer is made manager of the bank
in which he is employed ; and the moneylender,
wishing to obtain a post there, uses the forged
bill to force Nora to exert her influence with
Helmer on his behalf But she, having a hearty
contempt for the man, cannot be persuaded
by him that there was any harm in putting
her father's name on the bill, and ridicules the
suggestion that the law would not recognize
that she was right under the circumstances. It
is her husband's own contemptuous denunciation
of a forgery formerly committed by the money-
lender himself that destroys her self-satisfaction
and opens her eyes to her ignorance of the
serious business of the world to which her
husband belongs — the world outside the home
he shares with her. When he goes on to tell
her that commercial dishonesty is generally to
be traced to the influence of bad mothers, she
begins to perceive that the happy way in which
she plays with the children, and the care she
takes to dress them nicely, are not sufficient to
constitute her a fit person to train them. In
order to redeem the forged bill, she resolves to
borrow the balance due upon it from a friend of
the family. She has learnt to coax her husband

A DoWs House. %\

into giving her what she asks by appealing to his
affection for her : that is, by playing all sorts of
pretty tricks until he is wheedled into an amorous
humour. This plan she has adopted without
thinking about it, instinctively taking the line of
least resistance with him. And now she naturally
takes the same line with her husband's friend.
An unexpected declaration of love from him is
the result ; and it at once explains to her the
real nature of the domestic influence she has been
so proud of. All her illusions about herself are
now shattered : she sees herself as an ignorant
and silly woman, a dangerous mother, and a wife
kept for her husband's pleasure merely ; but she
only clings the harder to her illusion about him :
he is still the ideal husband who would make
any sacrifice to rescue her from ruin. She re-
solves to kill herself rather than allow him to
destroy his own career by taking the forgery on
himself to save her reputation. The final dis-
illusion comes when he, instead of at once pro-
posing to pursue this ideal line of conduct when
he hears of the forgery, naturally enough flies
into a vulgar rage and heaps invective on her
for disgracing him. Then she sees that their
whole family life has been a fiction — their home
a mere doll's house in which they have been
playing at ideal husband and father, wife and
mother. So she leaves him then and there in
F

82 The Qtiintessence of Ibsenism.

order to find out the reality of things for her-
self, and to gain some position not fundamen-
tally false, refusing to see her children again
until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to
live with him until she and he become capable
of a more honourable relation to one another
than that in which they have hitherto stood. He
at first cannot understand what has happened,
and flourishes the shattered ideals over her as if
they were as potent as ever. He presents the
course most agreeable to him — that of her stay-
ing at home and avoiding a scandal — as her
duty to her husband, to her children, and to her
religion ; but the magic of these disguises is
gone ; and at last even he understands what has
really happewed, and sits down alone to wonder
whether that more honourable relation can ever
come to pass between them.

GHOSTS.
In his next play, Ibsen returned to the charge
with such an uncompromising and outspoken
attack on marriage as a useless sacrifice of
human beings to an ideal, that his meaning was
obscured by its very obviousness. Ghosts^ as
it is called, is the story of a woman who has
faithfully acted as a model wife and mother,
sacrificing herself at every point with selfless
thoroughness. Her husband is a man with a

Ghosts. 83

huge capacity and appetite for sensuous enjoy-
ment. Society, prescribing ideal duties and not
enjoyment for him, drives him to enjoy him-
self in underhand and illicit ways. When he
marries his model wife, her devotion to duty
only makes life harder for him ; and he at last
takes refuge in the caresses of an undutiful but
pleasure-loving housemaid, and leaves his wife to
satisfy her conscience by managing his business
affairs whilst he satisfies his cravings as best he
can by reading novels, drinking, and flirting, as
aforesaid, with the servants. At this point even
those who are most indignant with Nora Helmer
for walking out of the doll's house, must admit
that Mrs Alving would be justified in walking
out of her house. But Ibsen is determined to
show you what comes of the scrupulous line of
conduct you were so angry with Nora for not pur-
suing. Mrs Alving feels that her place is by her
husband for better for worse, and by her child.
Now the ideal of wifely and womanly duty which
demands this from her also demands that she
should regard herself as an outraged wife, and
her husband as a scoundrel. The family ideal
again requires that she should suffer in silence,
and, for her son's sake, never shatter his faith in
the purity of home life by letting him know the
truth about his father. It is her duty to conceal
that truth from the world and from him. In

84 Tlie Quintessence of Ibsenisrn.

this she only falters for one moment. Her
marriage has not been a love match : she has,
in pursuance of her duty as a daughter, con-
tracted it for the sake of her family, although
her heart inclined to a highly respectable clergy-
man, a professor of her own idealism, named
Mandcrs. In the humiliation of her first dis-
covery of her husband's infidelity, she leaves the
house and takes refuge with Manders ; but he at
once leads her back to the path of duty, from
which she does not again swerve. With the
utmost devotion she now carries out a tre-
mendous scheme of lying and imposture. She
so manages her husband's affairs and so shields
his good name that everybody believes him to
be a public-spirited citizen of the strictest con-
formity to current ideals of respectability and
family life. She sits up of nights listening to
his lewd and silly conversation, and even drink-
ing with him, to keep him from going into the
streets and betraying what she considers his
vices. She provides for the servant he has
seduced, and brings up his illegitimate daughter
as a maid in her own household. And as a
crowning sacrifice, she sends her son away to
Paris to be educated there, knowing that if he
stays at home the shattering of his ideals must
come sooner or later. Her work is crowned
with success. She gains the esteem of her old

Ghosts. 85

love the clergyman, who is never tired of holding
up her household as a beautiful realization of the
Christian ideal of marriage. Her own martyrdom
is brought to an end at last by the death of her
husband in the odour of a most sanctified re-
putation, leaving her free to recall her son from
Paris and enjoy his society, and his love and
gratitude, in the flower of his early manhood.
But when he comes home, the facts refuse as
obstinately as ever to correspond to her ideals.
Oswald, the son, has inherited his father's love
of enjoyment; and when, in dull rainy weather,
he returns from Paris to the solemn, strictly
ordered house where virtue and duty have had
their temple for so many years, his mother sees
him first shew the unmistakable signs of boredom
with which she is so miserably familiar from of
old ; then sit after dinner killing time over the
bottle ; and finally — the climax of anguish —
begin to flirt with the maid who, as his mother
alone knows, is his own father's daughter. But
there is this worldwide difference in her insight
to the cases of the fiithcr and the son. She
did not love the father : she loves the son with
the intensity of a heart-starved woman who has
nothing else left to love. Instead of recoiling
from him with pious disgust and Pharisaical
consciousness of moral superiority, she sees at
once that he has a right to be happy in his own

86 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

way, and that she has no right to force him to
be dutiful and wretched in hers. She sees, too,
her injustice to the unfortunate father, and the
iniquity of the monstrous fabric of lies and false
appearances which she has wasted her life in
manufacturing. She resolves that the son's life,
at least, shall not be sacrificed to joyless and un-
natural ideals. But she soon finds that the work
of the ideals is not to be undone quite so easily.
In driving the father to steal his pleasures in
secrecy and squalor, they had brought upon him
the diseases bred by such conditions ; and her
son now tells her that those diseases have left
their mark on him, and that he carries poison
in his pocket against the time, foretold to him
by a Parisian surgeon, when he shall be struck
down with softening of the brain. In despera-
tion she turns to the task of rescuing him from
this horrible apprehension by making his life
happy. The house shall be made as bright as
Paris for him : he shall have as much champagne
as he wishes until he is no longer driven to
that dangerous resource by the dulness of his life
with her : if he loves the girl he shall marry her
if she were fifty times his half-sister. But the
half-sister, on learning the state of his health,
leaves the house; for she, too, is her father's
daughter, and is not going to sacrifice her life in
devotion to an invalid. When the mother and

Ghosts. %7

son are left alone in their dreary home, with the
rain still falling outside, all she can do for him is
to promise that if his doom overtakes him before
he can poison himself, she will make a final sacri-
fice of her natural feelings by performing that
dreadful duty, the first of all her duties that has
any real basis. Then the weather clears up at
last ; and the sun, which the young man has so
longed to see, appears. He asks her to give it to
him to play with ; and a glance at him shews her
that the ideals have claimed their victim, and
that the time has come for her to save him from
a real horror by sending him from her out of
the world, just as she saved him from an imagi-
nary one years before by sending him out of
Norway.

This last scene of Ghosts is so appallingly
tragic that the emotions it excites prevent the
meaning of the play from being seized and
discussed like that of A Doll's House. In Eng-
land nobody, as far as I know, seems to have
perceived that Ghosts is to A Doll's House what
Mr Walter Besant intended his own "sequel"*

* An astonishing^ production, which will be found in
the English Illustrated Magazme for January 1890. Mr
Besant makes the moneylender, as a reformed man, and
a pattern of all the virtues, repeat his old tactics by hold-
ing a forged bill in terrorem over Nora's grown-up
daughter, who is engaged to his son. The bill has been

88 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

to that play to be. Mr Besant attempted to shew
what might come of Nora's repudiation of that
idealism of which he is one of the most popular
professors. But the effect made on Mr Besant
by A Doll's House was very faint compared to
that produced on the English critics by the
first performance of Ghosts in this country. In
the earlier part of this essay I have shewn that
since Mrs Alving's early conceptions of duty
are as valid to ordinary critics as to Pastor
Manders, who must appear to them as an
admirable man, endowed with Helmer's good
sense without Helmer's selfishness, a pretty
general disapproval of the "moral" of the play
was inevitable. Fortunately, the newspaper

forged by her brother, who has inherited a tendency to
this sort of offence from his mother. Helmer having
taken to drink after the departure of his wife, and
forfeited his social position, the moneylender tells the
girl that if she persists in disgracing him by marrying
his son, he will send her brother to gaol. She evades
the dilemma by drowning herself. An exquisite absur-
dity is given to this jeu d'esprit by the moral, which
is, that if Nora had never run away from her husband
her daughter would never have drowned herself; and
also by the writer's naive unconsciousness of the fact
that he has represented the moneylender as doing over
again what he did in the play, with the difference that,
having become eminently respectable, he has also become
a remorseless scoundrel. Ibsen shows him as a good-
natured fellow at bottom.

Ghosts. 89

press went to such bedlamite lengths on this
occasion that Mr William Archer, the well-
known dramatic critic and translator of Ibsen,
was able to put the whole body of hostile
criticism out of court by simply quoting its
excesses in an article entitled Ghosts a?id Gibber-
ings, which appeared in the Pail Mall Gazette
of the 8th of April 1891. Mr Archer's extracts,
which he offers as a nucleus for a Dictionary
of Abuse modelled upon the Wagner " Schimpf-
Lexicon," are worth reprinting here as samples
of contemporary idealist criticism of the drama.

Descriptions of tiie Play.
" Ibsen's positively abominable play entitled
Gliosis. . . This disgusting representation. . .
Reprobation due to such as aim at infecting
the modern theatre with poison after desperately
inoculating themselves and others. . . An open
drain ; a loathsome sore unbandaged ; a dirty
act done publicly ; a lazar-house with all its
doors and windows open. . . Candid foulness.
. . . Kotzcbue turned bestial and cynical.
Offensive cynicism. . . Ibsen's melancholy and
malodorous world. . . Absolutely loathsome
and fetid. . . Gross, almost putrid indecorum.
. . . Literary carrion. . . Crapulous stuff. . .
Novel and perilous nuisance." — Daily Telegraph
(leading article). " This mass of vulgarity,

90 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

egotism, coarseness, and absurdity." — Daily
Telegraph (criticism). " Unutterably offensive.
. . . Prosecution under Lord Campbell's Act. . .
Abominable piece. . . Scandalous." — Standard.
" Naked loathsomeness. . . Most dismal and
repulsive production." — Daily News. " Revolt-
ingly suggestive and blasphemous. , . Char-
acters either contradictory in themselves, un-
interesting or abhorrent." — Daily Chronicle.
" A repulsive and degrading work." — Queen.
" Morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome and disgust-
ing story. . . A piece to bring the stage into
disrepute and dishonour with every right-
thinking man and woman." — Lloyd's. " Merely
dull dirt long drawn out." — Hawk. " Morbid
horrors of the hideous tale. . . Ponderous
dulness of the didactic talk, . . If any repeti-
tion of this outrage be attempted, the authorities
will doubtless wake from their lethargy." —
Sporting and Dramatic News. " Just a wicked
nightmare." — The Gentlezvonian. " Lugubrious
diagnosis of sordid impropriety. . . Characters
are prigs, pedants, and profligates. . . Morbid
caricatures. . . Maunderings of nookshotten
Norwegians. . . It is no more of a play than
an average Gaiety burlesque." — W. St Leger
in Black and White. " Most loathsome of all
Ibsen's plays. . . Garbage and offal." — Truth.
" Ibsen's putrid play called Ghosts. . . So loath-

Ghosts. 91

some an enterprise." — Academy. " As foul and
filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed
to disgrace the boards of an English theatre. . .
Dull and disgusting. . . Nastiness and malo-
dorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel." —
Era. " Noisome corruption." — Stage.

DesciHptio7is of Ibsen.

" An egotist and a bungler." — Daily Telegraph.
" A crazy fanatic. . . A crazy, cranky being. . .
Not only consistently dirty but deplorably dull."
— Truth. "The Norwegian pessimist in petto''
\sic\ — W. St Leger in Black and White. '' Ugly,
nasty, discordant, and downright dull. . . A
gloomy sort of ghoul, bent on groping for horrors
by night, and blinking like a stupid old owl when
the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into
his wrinkled eyes." — Gentlewoman. "A teacher
of the aistheticism of the Lock Hospital." —
Saturday Review.

Descriptio7is of Ibsen's Admirers.
" Lovers of prurience and dabblers in im-
propriety who are eager to gratify their illicit
tastes under the pretence of art." — Evening
Standard. " Ninety-seven per cent, of the people
who go to see Ghosts are nasty-minded people
who find the discussion of nasty subjects to
their taste in exact proportion to their nasti-

92 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

ness." — Sporting and Dramatic News. '* The
sexless. . . The unwomanly woman, the un-
sexed females, the whole army of unprepos-
sessing cranks in petticoats. . . Educated and
muck-ferreting dogs. . . Effeminate men and
male women. . . They all of them — men and
women alike — know that they are doing not only
a nasty but an illegal thing. . . The Lord
Chamberlain left them alone to wallow in Ghosts.
. . Outside a silly clique, there is not the slightest
interest in the Scandinavian humbug or all his
works. . . A wave of human folly." — Truth.

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.

After this, the reader will understand the
temper in which Ibsen set about his next play.
An Enemy of the People, in which, having done
sufficient execution among the ordinary social,
domestic, and puritanic ideals, he puts his finger
for a moment on political ideals. The play
deals with a local majority of middle-class
people who are pecuniarily interested in con-
cealing the fact that the famous baths which
attract visitors to their town and customers
to their shops and hotels are contaminated by
sewage. When an honest doctor insists on ex-
posing this danger, the townspeople immediately
disguise themselves ideally. Feeling the dis-
advantage of appearing in their true character

An Enemy of the People. 93

as a conspiracy of interested rogues against an
honest man, they pose as Society, as The People,
as Democracy, as the soHd Liberal Majority, and
other imposing abstractions, the doctor, in attack-
ing them, of course being thereby made an enemy
of The People, a danger to Society, a traitor to
Democracy, an apostate from the great Liberal
party, and so on. Only those who take an active
part in politics can appreciate the grim fun of the
situation, which, though it has an intensely local
Norwegian air, will be at once recognized as
typical in England, not, perhaps, by the pro-
fessional literary critics, who are for the most
^diVt faineants as far as political life is concerned,
but certainly by everyone who has got as far as
a seat on the committee of the most obscure
caucus.

As An Enemy of the People contains one or
two references to democracy which are any-
thing but respectful, it is necessary to define
Ibsen's criticism of it with precision. Democracy
is really only an arrangement by which the whole
people arc given a certain share in the control of
the government. It has never been proved that
this is ideally the best arrangement : it became
necessary because the people willed to have it ;
and it has been made effective only to the very
limited extent short of which the dissatisfaction
of the majority would have taken the form of

94 Tlie Quintessence of Ibsenisnt.

actual violence. Now when men had to submit
to kings, they consoled themselves by making
it an article of faith that the king was always
right — idealized him as a Pope, in fact. In the
same way we who have to submit to majorities
set up Voltaire's pope, " Monsieur Tout-le-
monde," and make it blasphemy against Demo-
cracy to deny that the majority is always right,
although that, as Ibsen says, is a lie. It is a
scientific fact that the majority, however eager
it may be for the reform of old abuses, is always
wrong in its opinion of new developments, or
rather is always unfit for them (for it can hardly
be said to be wrong in opposing developments
for which it is not yet fit). The pioneer is
a tiny minority of the force he heads ; and so,
though it is easy to be in a minority and yet be
wrong, it is absolutely impossible to be in the
majority and yet be right as to the newest social
prospects. We should never progress at all if it
were possible for each of us to stand still on
democratic principles until we saw whither all
the rest were moving, as our statesmen declare
themselves bound to do when they are called
upon to lead. Whatever clatter we may make
for a time with our filing through feudal serf
collars and kicking off rusty capitalistic fetters,
we shall never march a step forward except at
the heels of " the strongest man, he who is able

An Enemy of the People. 95

to stand alone " and to turn his back on " the
damned compact Liberal majority." All of
which is no disparagement of adult suffrage,
payment of members, annual parliaments and so
on, but simply a wholesome reduction of them
to their real place in the social economy as pure
machinery — machinery which has absolutely no
principles except the principles of mechanics,
and no motive power in itself whatsoever. The
idealization of public organizations is as danger-
ous as that of kings or priests. We need to
be reminded that though there is in the world
a vast number of buildings in which a certain
ritual is conducted before crowds called congre-
gations by a functionary called a priest, who is
subject to a central council controlling all such
functionaries on a few points, there is not there-
fore any such thing in reality as the ideal
Catholic Church, nor ever was, nor ever will
be. There may, too, be a highly elaborate
organization of public affairs ; but there is no
such thing as the ideal State. All abstractions
invested with collective consciousness or collec-
tive authority, set above the individual, and
exacting duty from him on pretence of acting or
thinking with greater validity than he, are man-
eating idols red with human sacrifices. This
position must not be confounded with Anarchism,
or the idealization of the repudiation of Govern-

g6 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

ments. Ibsen does not refuse to pay the tax
collector, but may be supposed to regard him,
not as an emissary of something that does not
exist and never did, called THE STATE, but simply
as the man sent round by the committee of
citizens (mostly fools as far as "the third em-
pire " is concerned) to collect the money for the
police or the paving and lighting of the streets.

THE WILD DUCK.

After An Enemy of the People^ Ibsen, as I have
said, left the vulgar ideals for dead, and set about
the exposure of those of the choicer spirits,
beginning with the incorrigible idealists who
had idealized his very self, and were becoming
known as Ibsenites. His first move in this
direction was such a tragi-comic slaughtering of
sham Ibsenism that his astonished victims plain-
tively declared that The Wild Duck, as the new
play was called, was a satire on his former works;
whilst the pious, whom he had disappointed so
severely by his interpretation of Brand, began to
think that he had come back repentant to the
fold. The household to which we are intro-
duced in The Wild Duck is not, like Mrs
Alving's, a handsome one made miserable by
superstitious illusions, but a shabby one made
happy by romantic illusions. The only member
of it who sees it as it really is is the wife, a good-

The Wild Duck, 97

natured Philistine who desires nothing better.
The husband, a vain, petted, spoilt dawdler,
believes that he is a delicate and high-souled
man, devoting his life to redeeming his old father's
name from the disgrace brought on it by an
imprisonment for breach of the forest laws. This
redemption he proposes to effect by making him-
self famous as a great inventor some day when he
has the necessary inspiration. Their daughter,
a girl in her teens, believes intensely in her father
and in the promised invention. The disgraced
grandfather cheers himself by drink whenever
he can get it ; but his chief resource is a wonder-
ful garret full of rabbits and pigeons. The old
man has procured a number of second-hand
Christmas trees ; and with these he has turned
the garret into a sort of toy forest, in which he
can play at bear hunting, which was one of the
sports of his youth and prosperity. The weapons
employed in the hunting expeditions are a gun
which will not go off, and a pistol which occa-
sionally brings down a rabbit or a pigeon.
A crowning touch is given to the illusion by a
wild duck, which, however, must not be shot,
as it is the special property of the girl, who
reads and dreams whilst the woman cooks and
washes, besides carrying on the photographic
work which is supposed to be the business of her
husband. She does not appreciate his highly
G

98 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

strung sensitiveness of character, which is con-
stantly suffering agonizing jars from her vul-
garity ; but then she does not appreciate that
other fact that he is a lazy and idle impostor.
Downstairs there is a disgraceful clergyman
named Molvik, a hopeless drunkard ; but even
he respects himself and is tolerated because of
a special illusion invented for him by another
lodger, a doctor — the now famous Dr Relling
— upon whom the lesson of the household above
has not been thrown away. Molvik, says the
doctor, must break out into drinking fits because
he is daimonic, an interesting explanation which
completely relieves the reverend gentleman from
the imputation of vulgar tippling.

Into this domestic circle there comes a new
lodger, an idealist of the most advanced type.
He greedily swallows the daimonic theory of
the clergyman's drunkenness, and enthusias-
tically accepts the photographer as the high-
souled hero he supposes himself to be ; but he is
troubled because the relations of the man and
his wife do not constitute an ideal marriage.
He happens to know that the woman, before her
marriage, was the cast-off mistress of his own
father ; and because she has not told her hus-
band this, he conceives her life as founded on
a lie, like that of Bernick in Pillars of Society.
He accordingly sets himself to work out the

The Wild Duck. 99

woman's salvation for her, and establish ideally
frank relations between the pair, by simply blurt-
ing out the truth, and then asking them, with
fatuous self-satisfaction, whether they do not
feel much the better for it. This wanton piece
of mischief has more serious results than a mere
domestic scene. The husband is too weak to
act on his bluster about outraged honour and
the impossibility of his ever living with his wife
again ; and the woman is merely annoyed with
the idealist for telling on her ; but the girl takes
the matter to heart and shoots herself The doubt
cast on her parentage, with her father's theatrical
repudiation of her, destroy her ideal place in
the home, and make her a source of discord
there ; so she sacrifices herself, thereby carrying
out the teaching of the idealist mischief-maker,
who has talked a good deal to her about the
duty and beauty of self-sacrifice, without fore-
seeing that he might be taken in mortal earnest.
The busybody thus finds that people cannot be
freed from their failings from without. They
must free themselves. When Nora is strong
enough to live out of the doll's house, she will go
out of it of her own accord if the door stands
open ; but if before that period you take her by
the scruff of the neck and thrust her out, she will
only take refuge in the next establishment of
the kind that offers to receive her. Woman has

lOO The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

thus two enemies to deal with : the old-fashioned
one who wants to keep the door locked, and the
new-fashioned one who wants to thrust her into
the street before she is ready to go. In the
cognate case of a hypocrite and liar like Bernick,
exposing him is a mere police measure : he is
none the less a liar and hypocrite when you have
exposed him. If you want to make a sincere
and truthful man of him, all that you can do is
to remove what you can of the external obstacles
to his exposing himself, and then wait for the
operation of his internal impulse to confess. If
he has no such impulse, then you must put up with
him as he is. It is useless to make claims on him
which he is not yet prepared to meet. Whether,
like Brand, w^e make such claims because to
refrain would be to compromise with evil, or, like
Gregers Werle, because we think their moral
beauty must recommend them at sight to every
one, we shall alike incur Relling's impatient
assurance that " life would be quite tolerable if
we could only get rid of the confounded duns
that keep on pestering us in our poverty with the
claims of the ideal."

ROSMERSIIOLM.

Ibsen did not in TJie Wild Ditck exhaust the
subject of the danger of forming ideals for other
people, and interfering in their lives with a view

Rosinersholni . I O I

to enabling them to realize those ideals. Cases
far more typical than that of the meddlesome
lodger are those of the priest who regards the
ennobling of mankind as a sort of trade process
of which his cloth gives him a monopoly, and the
clever woman who pictures a noble career for
the man she loves, and devotes herself to help-
ing him to achieve it. In RosDiersholm, the play
with which Ibsen followed up TJie Wild Duck,
there is an unpractical country parson, a gentle-
man of ancient stock, whose family has been for
many years a centre of social influence. The
tradition of that influence reinforces his priestly
tendency to regard the ennoblement of the world
as an external operation to be performed by
himself; and the need of such ennoblement is
very evident to him ; for his nature is a fine
one : he looks at the world with some dim
prevision of " the third empire." I le is married
to a woman of passionately affectionate nature,
who is very fond of him, but does not regard him
as a regenerator of the human race. Indeed she
does not share any of his dreams, and only acts
as an extinguisher on the sacred fire of his
idealism. He, she, her brother Kroll the head-
master, Kroll's wife, and their set form a select
circle of the best people in the place, comfort-
ably orbited in the social system, and quite
planetary in ascertained position and unim-

102 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

peachable respectability. Into the orbit comes
presently a wandering star, one Rebecca Gam-
vik, an unpropertied orphan, who has been
allowed to read advanced books, and is a Free-
thinker and a Radical — all things that disqua-
lify a poor woman for admission to the Rosmer
world. However, one must live somewhere ;
and as the Rosmer world is the only one in
which an ambitious and cultivated woman can
find powerful allies and educated companions,
Rebecca, being both ambitious and cultivated,
makes herself agreeable to the Rosmer circle
with such success that the affectionate and im-
pulsive but unintelligent Mrs Rosmer becomes
wildly fond of her, and is not content until she
has persuaded her to come and live with them.
Rebecca, then a mere adventuress fighting for
a foothold in polite society (which has hitherto
shown itself highly indignant at her thrusting
herself in where nobody has thought of pro-
viding room for her), accepts the offer all the
more readily because she has taken the mea-
sure of Parson Rosmer, and formed the idea of
playing upon his aspirations, and making herself
a leader in politics and society by using him as
a figure-head.

But now two difficulties arise. First, there is
Mrs Rosmer's extinguishing effect on her hus-
band— an effect which convinces Rebecca that

Rosuiersholm . 103

nothing can be done with him whilst his wife is
in the way. Second — a contingency quite un-
allowed for in her provident calculations — she
finds herself passionately enamoured of him.
The poor parson, too, falls in love with her ; but
he does not know it. He turns to the woman
who understands him like a sunflower to the
sun, and makes her his real friend and com-
panion. The wife feels this soon enough ; and
he, quite unconscious of it, begins to think that
her mind must be affected, since she has become
so intensely miserable and hysterical about
nothing — nothing that he can see. The truth is
that she has come under the curse of the ideal
too : she sees herself standing, a useless obstacle,
between her husband and the woman he really
loves, the woman who can help him to a glorious
career. She cannot even be the mother in the
household ; for she is childless. Then comes
Rebecca, fortified with a finely reasoned theory
that Rosmer's future is staked against his wife's
life, and says that it is better for all their sakes
that she should quit Rosmersholm. She even
hints that she must go at once if a grave
scandal is to be avoided. Mrs Rosmer, regard-
ing a scandal in Rosmersholm as the most
terrible thing that can happen, and seeing that
it could be averted by the marriage of Rebecca
and Rosmer if she were out of the way, writes a

104 ^/^^ Quintessence of Ibsenisvi.

letter secretly to Rosmer's bitterest enemy, the
editor of the local Radical paper, a man who
has forfeited his moral reputation by an in-
trigue which Rosmer has pitilessly denounced.
In this letter she implores him not to believe or
publish any stories that he may hear about
Rosmer, to the effect that he is in any way to
blame for anything that may happen to her.
Then she sets Rosmer free to marry Rebecca,
and to realize his ideals, by going out into the
garden and throwing herself into the millstream
that runs there.

Now follows a period of quiet mourning at
Rosmersholm. Everybody except Rosmer sus-
pects that Mrs Rosmer was not mad, and guesses
why she committed suicide. Only it would not do
to compromise the aristocratic party by treating
Rosmer as the Radical editor was treated. So
the neighbours shut their eyes and condole
with the bereaved clergyman ; and the Radical
editor holds his tongue because Radicalism is
getting respectable, and he hopes, with Rebecca's
help, to get Rosmer over to his side presently.
Meanwhile the unexpected has again happened
to Rebecca. Her passion is worn out ; but in
the long days of mourning she has found the
higher love ; and it is now for Rosmer's own sake
that she urges him to become a man of action,
and brood no more over* the dead. When his

Rosinersliolm. 105

friends start a Conservative paper and ask him to
become editor, she induces him to reply by declar-
ing himself a Radical and Freethinker. To his
utter amazement, the result is, not an animated
discussion of his views, but just such an attack
on his home life and private conduct as he had
formerly made on those of the Radical editor.
His friends tell him plainly that the compact of
silence is broken by his defection, and that there
will be no mercy for the traitor to the party.
Even the Radical editor not only refuses to
publish the fact that his new ally is a Free-
thinker (which would destroy all his social
weight as a Radical recruit), but brings up
the dead woman's letter as a proof that the
attack is sufficiently well-founded to make it
unwise to go too far. Rosmer, who at first
had been simply shocked that men whom he
had always honoured as gentlemen should de-
scend to such hideous calumny, now sees that
he really did love Rebecca, and is indeed guilty
of his wife's death. His first impulse is to shake
off the spectre of the dead woman by marrying
Rebecca ; but she, knowing that the guilt is hers,
puts that temptation behind her and refuses.
Then, as he thinks it all over, his dream of en-
nobling the world slips away from him : such
work can only be done by a man conscious of
his own innocence. To save him from despair,

lo6 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

Rebecca makes a great sacrifice. She " gives
him back his innocence " by confessing how she
drove his wife to kill herself ; and, as the con-
fession is made in the presence of Kroll, she
ascribes the whole plot to her ambition, and says
not a word of her passion. Rosmer, confounded
as he realizes what helpless puppets they have,
all been in the hands of this clever woman, for
the moment misses the point that unscrupulous
ambition, though it explains her crime, does
not account for her confession. He turns his
back on her and leaves the house with Kroll.
She quietly packs up her trunk, and is about to
vanish from Rosmersholm without another word
when he comes back alone to ask why she con-
fessed. She tells him why, offering him her
self-sacrifice as a proof that his power of en-
nobling others was no vain dream, since it is his
companionship that has changed her from the
selfish adventuress she was to the devoted woman
she has just proved herself to be. But he has
lost his faith in himself, and cannot believe her.
The proof is too subtle, too artful : he cannot
forget that she duped him by flattering this very
weakness of his before. Besides, he knows now
that it is not true — that people are not ennobled
from without. She has no more to say ; for she
can think of no further proof But he has thought
of an unanswerable one. Dare she make all doubt

Rosmersholm. 107

impossible by doing for his sake what the wife
did ? She asks what would happen if she had
the heart and the will to do it. " Then," he
replies, " I should have to believe in you. I
should recover my faith in my mission. Faith
in my power to ennoble human souls. Faith in
the human soul's power to attain nobility." " You
shall have your faith again," she answers. At
this pass the inner truth of the situation comes
out ; and the thin veil of a demand for " proof",
with its monstrous sequel of asking the woman
to kill herself in order to restore the man's good
opinion of himself, falls away. What has really
seized Rosmer is the old fatal ideal of expiation
by sacrifice. He sees that when Rebecca goes
into the millstream he must go too. And he
speaks his real mind in the words, " There is no
judge over us : therefore we must do justice upon
ourselves." But the woman's soul is free of this
to the end ; for when she says, " I am under the
power of the Rosmersholm view of life noiv.
What I have sinned it is fit I should expiate,"
we feel in that speech a protest against the
Rosmersholm view of life — the view that denied
her right to live and be happy from the first, and
now at the end, even in denying its God, exacts
her life as a vain blood-offering for its own blind-
ness. The woman has the higher light : she goes
to her death out of fellowship with the man who

io8 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

is driven thither by the superstition which has
destroyed his will. The story ends with his
taking her solemnly as his wife, and casting him-
self with her into the millstream.

It is unnecessary to repeat here what is said
on page 36 as to the vital part played in this
drama by the evolution of the lower into the
higher love. Peer Gynt, during the prophetic
episode in his career, shocks the dancing girl
Anitra into a remonstrance by comparing himself
to a cat. He replies, with his wisest air, that
from the standpoint of love there is perhaps not
so much difference between a tomcat and a
prophet as she may imagine. The number of
critics who have entirely missed the point of
Rebecca's transfiguration seems to indicate that
the majority of men, even among critics of
dramatic poetry, have not got beyond Peer
Gynt's opinion in this matter. No doubt they
would not endorse it as a definitely stated pro-
position, aware, as they are, that there is a poetic
convention to the contrary. But if they fail to
recognize the only possible alternative proposi-
tion when it is not only stated in so many
words by Rebecca West, but when without it her
conduct dramatically contradicts her character —
when they even complain of the contradiction as
a blemish on the play, I am afraid there can be
no further doubt that the extreme perplexity

TJie Lady from the Sea. 109

into which the first performance of Rosmersholm
in England plunged the Press was due entirely
to the prevalence of Peer Gynt's view of love
among the dramatic critics.

THE LADY FROM THE SEA.
Ibsen's next play, though it deals with the old
theme, does not insist on the power of ideals to
kill, as the two previous plays do. It rather
deals with the origin of ideals in unhappiness —
in dissatisfaction with the real. The subject
of The Lady from the Sea is the most poetic
fancy imaginable. A young woman, brought
up on the sea-coast, marries a respectable
doctor, a widower, who idolizes her and places
her in his household with nothing to do
but dream and be made much of by every-
body. Even the housekeeping is done by her
stepdaughter : she has no responsibility, no care,
and no trouble. In other words, she is an idle,
helpless, utterly dependent article of luxury. A
man turns red at the thought of being such
a thing ; but he thoughtlessly accepts a pretty
and fragile-looking woman in the same posi-
tion as a charming natural picture. The lady
from the sea feels an indefinite want in her
life. She reads her want into all other lives, and
comes to the conclusion that man once had to
choose whether he would be a land animal or a

no The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

creature of the sea ; and that having chosen the
land, he has carried about with him ever since a
secret sorrow for the element he has forsaken. The
dissatisfaction that gnaws her is, as she interprets
it, this desperate longing for the sea. When her
only child dies and leaves her without the work
of a mother to give her a valid place in the world,
she yields wholly to her longing, and no longer
cares for her husband, who, like Rosmer, begins to
fear that she is going mad. At last a seaman
appears and claims her as his wife on the ground
that they went years before through a rite which
consisted of their marrying the sea by throwing
their rings into it. This man, who had to fly from
her in the old time because he killed his captain,
and who fills her with a sense of dread and mys-
tery, seems to her to embody the attraction which
the sea has for her. She tells her husband that
she must go away with the seaman. Naturally
the doctor expostulates — declares that he cannot
for her own sake let her do so mad a thing. She
replies that he can only prevent her by locking her
up, and asks him what satisfaction it will be to him
to have her body under lock and key whilst her
heart is with the other man. In vain he urges
that he will only keep her under restraint until
the seaman goes — that he must not, dare not,
allow her to ruin herself. Her argument remains
unanswerable. The seaman openly declares that

TJie Lady from the Sea. 1 1 1

she will come ; so that the distracted husband
asks him does he suppose he can force her from
her home. To this the seaman replies that, on
the contrary, unless she comes of her own free
will there is no satisfaction to him in her coming
at all — the unanswerable argument again. She
echoes it by demanding her freedom to choose.
Her husband must cry off his law-made and
Church-made bargain ; renounce his claim to the
fulfilment of her vows ; and leave her free to go
back to the sea with her old lover. Then the
doctor, with a heavy heart, drops his prate about
his heavy responsibility for her actions, and throws
the responsibility on her by crying off as she
demands. The moment she feels herself a free
and responsible woman, all her childish fancies
vanish : the seaman becomes simply an old
acquaintance whom she no longer cares for ;
and the doctor's affection produces its natural
effect. In short, she says No to the seaman,
and takes over the housekeeping keys from her
stepdaughter without any further speculations
concerning that secret sorrow for the aban-
doned sea.

It should be noted here that EUida, the Lady
from the Sea, appears a much more fantastic
person to English readers than to Norwegian
ones. The same thing is true of many other
characters drawn by Ibsen, notably Peer Gynt,

112 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

who, if born in England, would certainly not
have been a poet and metaphysician as well as
a blackguard and a speculator. The extreme
type of Norwegian, as depicted by Ibsen, ima-
gines himself doing wonderful things, but does
nothing. He dreams as no Englishman dreams,
and drinks to make himself dream the more,
until his effective will is destroyed, and he
becomes a broken-down, disreputable sot, carry-
ing about the tradition that he is a hero, and
discussing himself on that assumption. Although
the number of persons who dawdle their life
away over fiction in England must be frightful,
and is probably increasing, yet we have no Ulric
Brendels, Rosmers, EUidas, Peer Gynts, nor any-
thing at all like them ; and it is for this reason
that I am disposed to fear that RosmersJiolm and
The Lady from the Sea will always be received
much more incredulously by English audiences
than A Doll's House and the plays in which the
leading figures are men and women of action.

PTEDDA GABLER.

Hedda Gabler, the heroine after whom the last
of Ibsen's plays (so far) is named, has no ideals
at all. She is a pure sceptic, a typical nineteenth
century figure, falling into the abyss between
the ideals which do not impose on her and the
realities which she has not yet discovered. The

Hedda Gabler. i 1 3

result is that she has no heart, no courage,
no conviction : with great beauty and great
energy she remains mean, envious, insolent, cruel
in protest against others' happiness, a bully in
reaction from her own cowardice. Hedda's
father, a general, is a widower. She has the
traditions of the military caste about her ; and
these narrow her activities to the customary hunt
for a socially and pecuniarily eligible husband.
She makes the acquaintance of a young man
of genius who, prohibited by an ideal-ridden
society from taking his pleasures except where
there is nothing to restrain him from excess, is
going to the bad in search of his good, with the
usual consequences. Hedda is intensely curious
about the side of life which is forbidden to
her, and in which powerful instincts, absolutely
ignored and condemned by the society with
which intercourse is permitted to her, steal their
satisfaction. An odd intimacy springs up be-
tween the inquisitive girl and the rake. Whilst
the general reads the paper in the afternoon,
Lovborg and Hedda have long conversations
in which he describes to her all his disreput-
able adventures. Although she is the ques-
tioner, she never dares to trust him : all the
questions are indirect ; and the responsibility for
his interpretations rests on him alone. Hedda
has no conviction whatever that these conver-
H

114 ^/^^ Quintessence of Ibsenism.

sations are disgraceful ; but she will not risk a
fight with society on the point : hypocrisy, the
homage that truth pays to falsehood, is easier to
face, as far as she can see, than ostracism. When
he proceeds to make advances to her, Hedda has
again no conviction that it would be wrong for
her to gratify his instinct and her own ; so that
she is confronted with the alternative of sinning
against herself and him, or sinning against social
ideals in which she has no faith. Making the
coward's choice, she carries it out with the utmost
bravado, threatening Lovborg with one of her
father's pistols, and driving him out of the house
with all that ostentation of outraged purity which
is the instinctive defence of women to whom
chastity is not natural, much as libel actions are
mostly brought by persons concerning whom
libels are virtually, if not technically, justifiable.
Hedda, deprived of her lover, now finds that
a life of conformity without faith involves some-
thing more terrible than the utmost ostracism :
to wit, boredom. This scourge, unknown among
revolutionists, is the curse which makes the
security of respectability as dust in the balance
against the unflagging interest of rebellion, and
which forces society to eke out its harmless re-
sources for killing time by licensing gambling,
gluttony, hunting, shooting, coursing, and other
vicious distractions for which even idealism has

Hedda G abler. 115

no disguise. These licenses, however, are only
available for people who have more than enough
money to keep up appearances with ; and as
Hedda's father is too poor to leave her much
more than the case of pistols, her boredom is
only mitigated by dancing, at which she gains
much admiration, but no substantial offers of
marriage. At last she has to find someone to
support her. A good-natured mediocrity of a
professor is all that is to be had ; and though she
regards him as a member of an inferior class,
and despises almost to loathing his family circle
of two affectionate old aunts and the inevitable
general servant who has helped to bring him up,
she marries \\\vix faute de niieux, and immediately
proceeds to wreck this prudent provision for her
livelihood by accommodating his income to her
expenditure instead of accommodating her ex-
penditure to his income. Her nature so rebels
against the whole sordid transaction that the
prospect of bearing a child to her husband drives
her almost frantic, since it will not only expose
her to the intimate solicitude of his aunts in the
course of a derangement of her health in which
she can see nothing that is not repulsive 'and
humiliating, but will make her one of his family
in earnest. To amuse herself in these galling
circumstances, she forms an underhand alliance
with a visitor who belongs to her old set, an elderly

Ii6 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

gallant who quite understands how little she
cares for her husband, and proposes a menage a
trois to her. She consents to his coming there
and talking to her as he pleases behind her hus-
band's back ; but she keeps her pistols in reserve
in case he becomes seriously importunate. He,
on the other hand, tries to get some hold over
her by placing her husband under pecuniary
obligations, as far as he can do it without being
out of pocket. And so Hedda's married life
begins, with only this gallant as a precaution
against the most desperate tedium.

Meanwhile Lovborg is drifting to disgrace by
the nearest way — through drink. In due time
he descends from lecturing at the university on
the history of civilization to taking a job in an
out-of-the-way place as tutor to the little children
of Sheriff Elvsted. This functionary, on being
left a widower with a number of children, marries
their governess, finding that she will cost him
less and be bound to do more for him as his
wife. As for her, she is too poor to dream
of refusing such a settlement in life. When
Lovborg comes, his society is heaven to her.
He does not dare to tell her about his dissi-
pations ; but he tells her about his unwritten
books. She does not dare to remonstrate with
him for drinking ; but he gives it up as soon as
he sees that it shocks her. Just as Mr Fearing,

Hedda Gable}'. 1 1 7

in Bunyan's story, was in a way the bravest of
the pilgrims, so this timid and unfortunate Mrs
Elvsted trembles her way to a point at which
Lovborg, quite reformed, publishes one book
which makes him celebrated for the moment, and
completes another, fair-copied in her handwriting,
to which he looks for a solid position as an origi-
nal thinker. But he cannot now stay tutoring
Elvsted's children ; so off he goes to town with
his pockets full of the money the published book
has brought him. Left once more in her old
lonely plight, knowing that without her Lovborg
will probably relapse into dissipation, and that
without him her life will not be worth living,
Mrs Elvsted is now confronted, on her own
higher plane, with the same alternative which
Hedda encountered. She must either sin against
herself and him or against the institution of
marriage under which Elvsted purchased his
housekeeper. It never occurs to her even that
she has any choice. She knows that her action
will count as "a dreadful thing"; but she sees
that she must go ; and accordingly Elvsted finds
himself without a wife and his children without
a governess, and so disappears unpitied from the
story.

Now it happens that Hedda's husband, Jorgen
Tesman, is an old friend and competitor (for
academic honours) of Lovborg, and also that

ii8 The Qidntcssencc of Ibsenism.

Hedda was a schoolfellow of Mrs Elvsted, or
Thea, as she had better now be called. Thea's first
business is to find out where Lovborg is ; for hers
is no preconcerted elopement : she has hurried
to town to keep Lovborg away from the bottle,
a design which she dare not hint at to himself
Accordingly, the first thing she does is to call on
the Tcsmans, who have just returned from their
honeymoon, to beg them to invite Lovborg to
their house so as to keep him in good company.
They consent, with the result that the two pairs
are brought together under the same roof, and
the tragedy begins to work itself out.

Hedda's attitude now demands a careful
analysis. Lovborg's experience with Thea has
enlightened his judgment of Hedda ; and as he
is, in his gifted way, an arrant /^j-^?/r and male
coquet, he immediately tries to get on romantic
terms with her — for have they not " a past " ? —
by impressing her with the penetrating criticism
that she is and always was a coward. She
admits that the virtuous heroics with the pistol
were pure cowardice ; but she is still so void of
any other standard of conduct than conformity
to the conventional ideals, that she thinks her
cowardice consisted in not daring to be wicked.
That is, she thinks that what she actually did
was the right thing ; and since she despises her-
self for doing it, and feels that he also rightly

Hedda G abler. 119

despises her for doing it, she gets a passionate
feeling that what is wanted is the courage to do
wrong. This unlooked-for reaction of idealism
— this monstrous but very common setting-up of
wrong -doing as an ideal, and of the wrongdoer
as a hero or heroine qua wrongdoer — leads
Hedda to conceive that when Lovborg tried to
seduce her he was a hero, and that in allowing
Thea to reform him he has played the recreant.
In acting on this misconception, she is restrained
by no consideration for any of the rest. Like
all people whose lives are valueless, she has no
more sense of the value of Lovborg's or Tesman's
or Thea's lives than a railway shareholder has
of the value of a shunter's. She gratifies her
intense jealousy of Thea by deliberately taunting
Lovborg into breaking loose from her influence
by joining a carouse at which he not only loses
his manuscript, but finally gets into the hands
of the police through behaving outrageously in
the house of a disreputable woman whom he
accuses of stealing it, not knowing that it has
been picked up by Tesman and handed to
. Hedda for safe keeping. Now to Hedda this
bundle of paper in another woman's handwriting
is the fruit of Lovborg's union with Thea : he
himself speaks of it as " their child." So when
he turns his despair to romantic account by
coming to the two women and making a tragic

I20 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

scene, telling Thea that he has cast the manu-
script, torn into a thousand pieces, out upon the
fiord ; and then, when she is gone, telling Hedda
that he has brought " the child " to a house of
ill-fame and lost it there, she, deceived by his
posing, and thirsting to gain faith in human
nobility from a heroic deed of some sort, makes
him a present of one of her pistols, only begging
him to '* do it beautifully", by which she means
that he is to kill himself without spoiling his
appearance. He takes it unblushingly, and
leaves her with the air of a man who is looking
his last on earth. But the moment he is out of
sight of his audience, he goes back to the house
where he still supposes that the manuscript was
lost, and there renews the wrangle of the night
before, using the pistol to threaten the woman,
with the result that he gets shot in the abdomen,
leaving the weapon to fall into the hands
of the police. Meanwhile Hedda deliberately
burns " the child." Then comes her elderly
gallant to tell her the true story of the heroic
deed which Lovborg promised her to do so
beautifully, and to make her understand that he
himself has now got her into his power by his
ability to identify the pistol. She has either to
be the slave of this man, or else to face the
scandal of the connection of her name at the
inquest with a squalid debauch ending in a

Hcdda Gable}'. I2i

murder. Thea, too, is not crushed by Lovborg's
death. Ten minutes after she has received the
news with a cry of heartfelt loss, she sits down
with Tesman to reconstruct " the child " from
the old notes which she has preserved. Over
the congenial task of collecting and arranging
another man's ideas Tesman is perfectly happy,
and forgets his beautiful Hedda for the first
time. Thea the trembler is still mistress of the
situation, holding the dead Lovborg, gaining
Tesman, and leaving Hedda to her elderly
admirer, who smoothly remarks that he will
answer for Mrs Tesman not being bored whilst
her husband is occupied with Thea in putting
the pieces of the book together. However, he
has again reckoned without General Gabler's
second pistol. She shoots herself then and there ;
and so the story ends.

V.

THE MORAL OF THE PLAYS.

IN following this sketch of the plays written
by Ibsen to illustrate his thesis that the
real slavery of to-day is slavery to ideals of
virtue, it may be that readers who have conned
Ibsen through idealist spectacles have wondered
that I could so pervert the utterances of a great
poet. Indeed I know already that many of
those who are most fascinated by the poetry of
the plays will plead for any explanation of them
rather than that given by Ibsen himself in the
plainest terms through the mouths of Mrs Alving,
Relling, and the rest. No great writer uses his
skill to conceal his meaning. There is a tale
by a famous Scotch story-teller which would
have suited Ibsen exactly if he had hit on it
first. Jeanie Deans saciificing her sister's life
on the scaffold to her own ideal of duty is far
more horrible than the sacrifice in RosmersJioIm ;
and the dens ex macJmta expedient by which
Scott makes the end of his story agreeable is no
solution of the moral problem raised, but only a

The Moral of the Plays. 123

puerile evasion of it. He undoubtedly believed
that it was right that Effie should hang for the
sake of Jeanie's ideals.* Consequently, if I were
to pretend that Scott wrote The Heart of Mid-
lothian to shew that people are led to do as
mischievous, as unnatural, as murderous things
by their religious and moral ideals as by their
envy and ambition, it would be easy to confute
me from the pages of the book itself. But
Ibsen has made his meaning no less plain than
Scott's. If any one attempts to maintain that
Ghosts is a polemic in favour of indissoluble
monogamic marriage, or that The Wild Duck
was written to inculcate that truth should be
told for its own sake, they must burn the text of
the plays if their contention is to stand. The
reason that Scott's story is tolerated by those
who shrink from Ghosts is not that it is less

"'^The common-sense solution of the moral problem has
often been delivered by acclamation in the theatre. Some
sixteen or seventeen years ago I witnessed a performance
of a melodrama founded on this story. After the painful
trial scene, in which Jeanie Deans condemns her sister to
death by refusing to swear to a perfectly innocent fiction,
came a scene in the prison. " If it had been me," said
the jailor, " I wad ha' sworn a hole through an iron pot."
The roar of applause which burst from the pit and gallery
was thoroughly Ibsenite in sentiment. The speech, by
the way, was a "gag" of the actor's, and is not to be
found in the acting edition of the play.

1 24 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

terrible, but that Scott's views are familiar to all
well-brought-up ladies and gentlemen, whereas
Ibsen's are for the moment so strange as to be
almost unthinkable. He is so great a poet
that the idealist finds himself in the dilemma of
being unable to conceive that such a genius
should have an ignoble meaning, and yet equally
unable to conceive his real meaning as otherwise
than ignoble. Consequently he misses the mean-
ing altogether in spite of Ibsen's explicit and
circumstantial insistence on it, and proceeds to
interpolate a meaning which conforms to his
own ideal of nobility. Ibsen's deep sympathy
with his idealist figures seems to countenance
this method of making confusion. Since it is
on the weaknesses of the higher types of char-
acter that idealism seizes, his examples of vanity,
selfishness, folly, and failure are not vulgar
villains, but men who in an ordinary novel or
melodrama would be heroes. His most tragic
point is reached in the destinies of Brand and
Rosmer, who drive those whom they love to
death in its most wanton and cruel form. The
ordinary Philistine commits no such atrocities :
he marries the woman he likes and lives more or
less happily ever after ; but that is not because
he is greater than Brand or Rosmer, but because
he is less. The idealist is a more dangerous
animal than the Philistine just as a maa is a

The Moral of the Plays. 125

more dangerous animal than a sheep. Though
Brand virtually murdered his wife, 1 can under-
stand many a woman, comfortably married to
an amiable Philistine, reading the play and envy-
ing the victim her husband. For when Brand's
wife, having made the sacrifice he has exacted,
tells him that he was right ; that she is happy
now ; that she sees God face to face — but reminds
him that " whoso sees Jehovah dies," he in-
stinctively clasps his hands over her eyes ; and
that action raises him at once far above the
criticism that sneers at idealism from beneath,
instead of surveying it from the clear ether above,
which can only be reached through its mists.

If, in my account of the plays, I have myself
suggested false judgments by describing the
errors of the idealists in the terms of the life they
had risen above rather than in that of the life they
fell short of, I can only plead, with but a moderate
disrespect to a large section of my readers, that
if I had done otherwise I should have failed
wholly to make the matter understood. Indeed
the terms of the realist morality have not yet
appeared in our living language ; and I have
already, in this very distinction between idealism
and realism, been forced to insist on a sense of
these terms which, had not Ibsen forced my hand,
I should perhaps have conveyed otherwise, so
strongly does it conflict in many of its applica-

126 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

tions with the vernacular use of the words. This,
however, was a trifle compared to the difficulty
which arose, when personal characters had to be
described, from our inveterate habit of labelling
men with the names of their moral qualities
without the slightest reference to the underlying
will which sets these qualities in action. At a
recent anniversary celebration of the Paris Com-
mune of 1 87 1, I was struck by the fact that no
speaker could find a eulogy for the Federals
which would not have been equally appropriate
to the peasants of La Vendee who fought for
their tyrants against the French revolutionists,
or to the Irishmen and Highlanders who fought
for the Stuarts at the Boyne or Culloden. Nor
could the celcbrators find any other adjectives
for their favourite leaders of the Commune than
those which had recently been liberally applied
by all the journals to an African explorer
whose achievements were just then held in the
liveliest abhorrence by the whole meeting. The
statements that the slain members of the Com-
mune were heroes who died for a noble ideal
would have left a stranger quite as much in the
dark about them as the counter statements, once
common enough in middle-class newspapers, that
they were incendiaries and assassins. Our obitu-
ary notices are examples of the same ambiguity.
Of all the public men lately deceased, none

The Moral of the Plays. 1 27

have been made more interesting by strongly
marked personal characteristics than the late
Charles Bradlaugh. He was not in the least like
any other notable member of the House of Com-
mons. Yet when the obituary notices appeared,
with the usual string of qualities — eloquence,
determination, integrity, strong common-sense,
and so on, it would have been possible, by merely
expunging all names and other external details
from these notices, to leave the reader entirely
unable to say whether the subject of them was
Mr Gladstone, Mr Morley, Mr Stead, or any one
else no more like Mr Bradlaugh than Garibaldi
or the late Cardinal Newman, whose obituary
certificates of morality might nevertheless have
been reprinted almost verbatim for the occasion
without any gross incongruity. Bradlaugh had
been the subject of many sorts of newspaper notice
in his time. Ten years ago, when the middle
classes supposed him to be a revolutionist, the
string of qualities which the press hung upon
him were all evil ones, great stress being laid on
the fact that as he was an atheist it would be
an insult to God to admit him to Parliament.
When it became apparent that he was a conser-
vative force in politics, he, without any recantation
of his atheism, at once had the string of evil
qualities exchanged for a rosary of good ones ;
but it is hardly necessary to add that neither

I2S The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

the old badge nor the new will ever give any
inquirer the least clue to the sort of man he
actually was : he might have been Oliver Crom-
well or Wat Tyler or Jack Cade, Penn or
Wilberforce or Wellington, the late Mr Hampden
of flat -earth- theory notoriety or Proudhon or
the Archbishop of Canterbury, for all the dis-
tinction that such labels could give him one
way or the other. The worthlessness of these
accounts of individuals is recognized in practice
every day. Tax a stranger before a crowd
with being a thief, a coward, and a liar ; and
the crowd will suspend its judgment until you
answer the question, " What's he done ? " At-
tempt to make a collection for him on the
ground that he is an upright, fearless, high-
principled hero ; and the same question must be
answered before a penny goes into the hat.

The reader must therefore discount those par-
tialities which I have permitted myself to express
in telling the stories of the plays. They are as
much beside the mark as any other example of
the sort of criticism which seeks to create an
impression favourable or otherwise to Ibsen by
simply pasting his characters all over with good
or bad conduct marks. If any person cares to
describe Hedda Gabler as a modern Lucretia
who preferred death to dishonour, and Thea
Elvsted as an abandoned, perjured strumpet who

T]ie Moral of the Plays. 129

deserted the man she had sworn before her God
to love, honour, and obey until her death, the
play contains conclusive evidence establishing
both points. If the critic goes on to argue
that as Ibsen manifestly means to recommend
Thea's conduct above Hedda's by making the
end happier for her, the moral of the play is a
vicious one, that, again, cannot be gainsaid. If,
on the other hand. Ghosts be defended, as the
dramatic critic of Piccadilly lately did defend it,
because it throws into divine relief the beautiful
figure of the simple and pious Pastor Manders,
the fatal compliment cannot be parried. When
you have called Mrs Alving an "emancipated
woman " or an unprincipled one, Alving a
debauchee or a "victim of society," Nora a
fearless and noble-hearted woman or a shocking
little liar and an unnatural mother, Ilelmer a
selfish hound or a model husband and father,
according to your bias, you have said something
which is at once true and false, and in either case
perfectly idle.

The statement that Ibsen's plays have an
immoral tendency, is, in the sense in which it is
used, quite true. Immorality does not neces-
sarily imply mischievous conduct : it implies
conduct, mischievous or not, which does not
conform to current ideals. Since Ibsen has
devoted himself almost entirely to shewing that
I

130 The Qiimtessence of Ihsetiism.

the spirit or will of Man is constantly outgrow-
ing his ideals, and that therefore conformity to
them is constantly producing results no less
tragic than those which follow the violation of
ideals which are still valid, the main effect of his
plays is to keep before the public the importance
of being always prepared to act immorally,
to remind men that they ought to be as careful
how they yield to a temptation to tell the truth
as to a temptation to hold their tongues, and to
urge upon women that the desirability of their
preserving their chastity depends just as much
on circumstances as the desirability of taking
a cab instead of walking. He protests against
the ordinary assumption that there are certain
supreme ends which justify all means used to
attain them ; and insists that every end shall be
challenged to shew that it justifies the means.
Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly
demanding human sacrifices. Let none of them,
says Ibsen, be placed above the obligation to
prove that they are worth the sacrifices they
demand ; and let every one refuse to sacrifice
himself and others from the moment he loses his
faith in the reality of the ideal. Of course it
will be said here by incorrigibly slipshod readers
that this, so far from being immoral, is the high-
est morality ; and so, in a sense, it is ; but I really
shall not waste any further explanation on those

The Moral of the Plays. 1 3 1

who will neither mean one thing or another by
a word nor allow me to do so. In short, then,
among those who are not ridden by current
ideals no question as to the morality of Ibsen's
plays will ever arise ; and among those who are
so ridden his plays will seem immoral, and
cannot be defended against the accusation.

There can be no question as to the effect
likely to be produced on an individual by his
conversion from the ordinary acceptance of
current ideals as safe standards of conduct, to
the vigilant open-mindedness of Ibsen. It must
at once greatly deepen the sense of moral re-
sponsibility. Before conversion the individual
anticipates nothing worse in the way of exami-
nation at the judgment bar of his conscience
than such questions as, Have you kept the com-
mandments ? Have you obeyed the law ? Have
you attended church regularly ; paid your rates
and taxes to Caesar ; and contributed, in reason,
to charitable institutions? It may be hard to
do all these things ; but it is still harder not to
do them, as our ninety-nine moral cowards in
the hundred well know. And even a scoundrel
can do them all and yet live a worse life than
the smuggler or prostitute who must answer No
all through the catechism. Substitute for such
a technical examination one in which the whole
point to be settled is, Guilty or Not Guilty ? — one

132 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

in which there is no more and no less respect for
chastity than for incontinence, for subordination
than for rebellion, for legality than for illegality,
for piety than for blasphemy, in short, for the
standard virtues than for the standard vices, and
immediately, instead of lowering the moral
standard by relaxing the tests of worth, you
raise it by increasing their stringency to a point
at which no mere Pharisaism or moral cowardice
can pass them. Naturally this does not please
the Pharisee. The respectable lady of the
strictest Christian principles, who has brought
up her children with such relentless regard to
their ideal morality that if they have any spirit
left in them by the time they arrive at years of
independence they use their liberty to rush deli-
riously to the devil — this unimpeachable woman
has always felt it unjust that the respect she
wins should be accompanied by deep-seated
detestation, whilst the latest spiritual heiress of
Nell Gwynne, whom no respectable person dare
bow to in the street, is a popular idol. The
reason is — though the virtuous lady does not
know it — that Nell Gwynne is a better woman
than she ; and the abolition of the idealist test
which brings her out a worse one, and its replace-
ment by the realist test which would shew the true
relation between them, would be a most desirable
step forward in public morals, especially as it

TJie Moral of the Plays. 133

would act impartially, and set the good side of
the Pharisee above the bad side of the Bohemian
as ruthlessly as it would set the good side of the
Bohemian above the bad side of the Pharisee.
For as long as convention goes counter to reahty
in these matters, people will be led into Hedda
Gabler's error of making an ideal of vice. If
we maintain the convention that the distinction
between Catherine of Russia and Queen Vic-
toria, between Nell Gwynne and Mrs Proudie, is
the distinction between a bad woman and a
good woman, we need not be surprised when
those who sympathize with Catherine and Nell
conclude that it is better to be a bad woman
than a good one, and go on recklessly to con-
ceive a prejudice against teetotallism and mono-
gamy, and a prepossession in favour of alcoholic
excitement and promiscuous amours. Ibsen him-
self is kinder to the man who has gone his own
way as a rake and a drunkard than to the man
who is respectable because he dare not be other-
wise. We find that the franker and healthier a
boy is, the more certain is he to prefer pirates
and highwa}'men, or Dumas musketeers, to
"pillars of society" as his favourite heroes of
romance. We have already seen both Ibsenites
and anti-Ibsenites who seem to think that the
cases of Nora and Mrs Elvsted are meant to
establish a golden rule for women who wish to

1 34 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

be " emancipated," the said golden rule being
simply, Run away from your husband. But
in Ibsen's view of life, that would come under
the same condemnation as the conventional
golden rule, Cleave to your husband until death
do you part. Most people know of a case or
two in which it would be wise for a wife to follow
the example of Nora or even of Mrs Elvsted,
But they must also know cases in which the
results of such a course would be as tragi-comic
as those of Gregers Werle's attempt in The Wild
Duck to do for the Ekdal household what Lona
Hessel did for the Bernick household. What
Ibsen insists on is that there is no golden rule
— that conduct must justify itself by its effect
upon happiness and not by its conformity to any
rule or ideal. And since happiness consists in
the fulfilment of the will, which is constantly
growing, and cannot be fulfilled to-day under
the conditions which secured its fulfilment yes-
terday, he claims afresh the old Protestant right
of private judgment in questions of conduct as
against all institutions, the so-called Protestant
Churches themselves included.

Here I must leave the matter, merely remind-
ing those who may think that I have forgotten
to reduce Ibsenism to a formula for them, that
its quintessence is that there is no formula.

APPENDIX.

1HAVE a word or two to add as to the diffi-
culties which Ibsen's philosophy places in
the way of those who are called on to
impersonate his characters on the stage in Eng-
land. His idealist figures, at once higher and
more mischievous than ordinary Philistines,
puzzle by their dual aspect the conventional
actor, who persists in assuming that if he is to
be selfish on the stage he must be villainous ;
that if he is to be self-sacrificing and scrupulous
he must be a hero ; and that if he is to satirize
himself unconsciously he must be comic. He
is constantly striving to get back to familiar
ground by reducing his part to one of the stage
types with which he is familiar, and which he
has learnt to present by rule of thumb. The
more experienced he is, the more certain
is he to de-Ibsenize the play into a melo-
drama or a farcical comedy of the common
sort. Give him Helmer to play, and he begins
by declaring that the part is a mass of " incon-
sistencies ", and ends by suddenly grasping the
idea that it is only Joseph Surface over again.
Give him Gregers Werle, the devotee of Truth,
and he will first play him in the vein of George

1 36 The Quintessence of Ibsenisnt.

Washington, and then, when he finds that the
audience laughs at him instead of taking him
respectfully, rush to the conclusion that Gregers
is only his old friend the truthful milkman in
A Phenomenon in a Smock Frock\ and begin to
play for the laughs and relish them. That is,
if there are only laughs enough to make the
part completely comic. Otherwise he will want
to omit the passages which provoke them.
To be laughed at when playing a serious
part is hard upon an actor, and still more
upon an actress : it is derision, than which
nothing is more terrible to those whose liveli-
hood depends on public approbation, and whose
calling produces an abnormal development of
self- consciousness. Now Ibsen undoubtedly
does freely require from his artists that they
shall not only possess great skill and power on
every plane of their art, but that they shall also
be ready to make themselves acutely ridiculous
sometimes at the very climax of their most deeply
felt passages. It is not to be wondered at that
they prefer to pick and choose among the lines
of their parts, retaining the great professional
opportunities afforded by the tragic scenes, and
leaving out the touches which complete the por-
trait at the expense of the model's vanity. If
an actress of established reputation were asked
to play Hedda Gabler, her first impulse would

Appendix. 137

probably be to not only turn Hedda into a
Brinvilliers, or a Borgia, or a " Forget-me-not ",
but to suppress all the meaner callosities and
odiousnesses which detract from Hedda's dig-
nity as dignity is estimated on the stage. The
result would be about as satisfactory to a skilled
critic as that of the retouching which has made
shop window photography the most worthless
of the arts. The whole point of an Ibsen play
lies in the exposure of the very conventions
upon which are based those by which the actor
is ridden. Charles Surface or Tom Jones may
be very effectively played by artists who fully
accept the morality professed by Joseph Surface
and Blifil. Neither Fielding nor Sheridan forces
upon either actor or audience the dilemma
that since Charles and Tom are lovable, there
must be something hopelessly inadequate in
the commercial and sexual morality which con-
demns them as a pair of blackguards. The
ordinary actor will tell you that the authors
" do not defend their heroes' conduct ', not
seeing that making them lovable is the most
complete defence of their conduct that could
possibly be made. How far Fielding and
Sheridan saw it — how far Moliere or Mozart
were convinced that the statue had right on his
side when he threw Don Juan into the bottom-
less pit —how far Milton went in his sympathy

138 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

with Lucifer : all these are speculative points
which no actor has hitherto been called upon to
solve. But they are the very subjects of Ibsen's
plays : those whose interest and curiosity are
not excited by them find him the most puzzling
and tedious of dramatists. He has not only
made " lost " women lovable ; but he has recog-
nized and avowed that this is a vital justifica-
tion for them, and has accordingly explicitly
argued on their side and awarded them the
sympathy which poetic justice grants only to
the righteous. He has made the terms "lost"
and " ruined " in this sense ridiculous by making
women apply them to men with the most ludi-
crous effect. Hence Ibsen cannot be played
from the conventional point of view : to make
that practicable the plays would have to be
rewritten. In the rewriting, the fascination of the
parts would vanish, and with it their attraction
for the performers. A D oil's House was adapted
in this fashion, though not at the instigation of
an actress; but the adaptation fortunately failed.
Otherwise we might have to endure in Ibsen's
case what we have already endured in that of
Shakespear, many of whose plays were sup-
planted for centuries by incredibly debased ver-
sions, of which Gibber's Richard III. and Gar-
rick's Katharine and Petruchio have lasted to
our own time.

Appendix. 1 39

Taking Talma's estimate of eighteen years
as the apprenticeship of a completely accom-
plished stage artist, there is little encouragement
to offer Ibsen parts to our finished actors and
actresses. They do not understand them, and
would not play them in their integrity if they
could be induced to attempt them. In Eng-
land only two women in the full maturity of
their talent have hitherto meddled with Ibsen.
One of these, Miss Genevieve Ward, who
" created " the part of Lona Hessel in the Eng-
lish version of Pillars of Society, had the advan-
tage of exceptional enterprise and intelligence,
and of a more varied culture and experience of
life and art than are common in her profes-
sion. The other, Mrs Theodore Wright, the first
English Mrs Alving, was hardly known to the
dramatic critics, though her personality and her
artistic talent as an amateur reciter and actress
had been familiar to the members of most
of the advanced social and political bodies in
London since the days of the International. It
was precisely because her record lay outside the
beaten track of newspaper criticism that she was
qualified to surprise its writers as she did. In
every other instance, the women who first ven-
tured upon playing Ibsen heroines were young
actresses whose ability had not before been
fully tested and whose technical apprenticeships

140 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

were far from complete. Miss Janet Achurch,
though she settled the then disputed question of
the feasibility of Ibsen's plays on the English
stage by her impersonation of Nora in 1889,
which still remains the most complete artistic
achievement in the new genre, had not been long
enough on the stage to secure a unanimous ad-
mission of her genius, though it was of the most
irresistible and irrepressible kind. Miss Florence
Farr, who may claim the palm for artistic cour-
age and intellectual conviction in selecting for
her experiment Rosniersholin, incomparably the
most difficult and dangerous, as it is also the
greatest, of Ibsen's later plays, had almost relin-
quished her profession from lack of interest in
its routine, after spending a few years in acting
farcical comedies. Miss Elizabeth Robins and
Miss Marion Lea, to whose unaided enterprise
we owe our early acquaintance with Hedda
Gabler on the stage, were, like Miss Achurch
and Miss Farr, juniors in their profession. All
four were products of the modern movement for
the higher education of women, literate, in touch
with advanced thought, and coming by natural
predilection on the stage from outside the thea-
trical class, in contradistinction to the senior
generation of inveterately sentimental actresses,
schooled in the old fashion if at all, born into their
profession, quite out of the political and social

Appendix. 14 1

movement around them — in short, intellectually
7iawe to the last degree. The new school says
to the old, You cannot play Ibsen because you
are ignoramuses. To which the old school re-
torts, You cannot play anything because you are
amateurs. But taking amateur in its sense of
unpractised executant, both schools are amateur
as far as Ibsen's plays are concerned. The old
technique breaks down in the new theatre ; for
though in theory it is a technique of general
application, making the artist so plastic that he
can mould himself to any shape designed by the
dramatist, in practice it is but a stock of tones
and attitudes out of which, by appropriate selec-
tion and combination, a certain limited number
of conventional stage figures can be made up.
It is no more possible to get an Ibsen character
out of it than to contrive a Greek costume out
of an English wardrobe ; and some of the
attempts already made have been so grotesque,
that at present, when one of the more specifi-
cally Ibsenian parts has to be filled, it is actually
safer to entrust it to a novice than to a com-
petent and experienced actor.

A steady improvement may be expected in
the performances of Ibsen's plays as the young
players whom they interest gain the experi-
ence needed to make mature artists of them.
They will gain this experience not only in

142- TJie Quintessence of Ihsenism.

plays by Ibsen himself, but in the vvorlcs of
dramatists who will have been largely influenced
by Ibsen. Playwrights who formerly only com-
pounded plays according to the received pre-
scriptions for producing tears or laughter, are
already taking their profession seriously to the
full extent of their capacity, and venturing more
and more to substitute the incidents and cata-
strophes of spiritual history for the swoons, sur-
prises, discoveries, murders, duels, assassinations
and intrigues which are the commonplaces of
the theatre at present. Others, who have no
such impulse, find themselves forced to raise the
quality of their work by the fact that even
those who witness Ibsen's plays with undisguised
weariness and aversion, find, when they return
to their accustomed theatrical fare, that they
have suddenly become conscious of absurdities
and artificialities in it which never troubled them
before. In just the same way the painters of
the Naturalist school reformed their opponents
much more extensively than the number of their
own direct admirers indicates : for example, it
is still common to hear the most contemptuous
abuse and ridicule of Monet and Whistler from
persons who have nevertheless had their former
tolerance of the unrealities of the worst type of
conventional studio picture wholly destroyed by
these painters. Until quite lately, too, musicians

Appendix. 143

were to be heard extolling Donizetti in the
same breath with which they vehemently decried
Wagner. They would make wry faces at every
chord in Tristan und Isolde, and never suspected
that their old faith was shaken until they went
back to La Favorite, and found that it had become
as obsolete as the rhymed tragedies of Lee and
Otway. In the drama then, we may depend on
it that though we shall not have another Ibsen,
yet nobody will write for the stage after him as
most playwrights wrote before him. This will
involve a corresponding change in the techni-
cal stock-in-trade of the actor, whose ordinary
training will then cease to be a positive disad-
vantage to him when he is entrusted with an
Ibsen part.

No one need fear on this account that Ibsen
will gradually destroy melodrama. It might as
well be assumed that Shakespcar will destroy
music hall entertainments, or the prose romances
of William Morris supersede the Illustrated
Police News. All forms of art rise with the
culture and capacity of the human race ; but
the forms rise together : the higher forms do
not return upon and submerge the lower. The
wretch who finds his happiness in setting a leash
of greyhounds on a hare or in watching a terrier
killing rats in a pit, may evolve into the mere
blockhead who would rather go to a " free-and-

144 '^^^^ Quintessence of Ibscnisin.

easy " and chuckle over a dull, silly, obscene song ;
but such a step will not raise him to the level of
the frequenter of music halls of the better class,
where, though the entertainment is administered
in small separate doses or "turns", yet the
turns have some artistic pretension. Above
him again is the patron of that elementary form
of sensational drama in which there is hardly
any more connection between the incidents than
the fact that the same people take part in them
and call forth some very simple sort of moral
judgment by being consistently villainous or
virtuous throughout. As such a drama would
be almost as enjoyable if the acts were played in
the reverse of their appointed order, no incon-
venience except that of a back scat is suffered
by the playgoer who comes in for half price at
nine o'clock. On a higher plane we have dramas
with a rational sequence of incidents, the in-
terest of any one of which depends on those
which have preceded it ; and as we go up from
plane to plane we find this sequence becoming
more and more organic until at last we come to
a class of play in which nobody can understand
the last act who has not seen the first also.
Accordingly, the institution of half price at nine
o'clock does not exist at theatres devoted to
plays of this class. The highest type of play is
completely homogeneous often consisting of a

Appendix. 145

single very complex incident ; and not even the
most exhaustive information as to the story
enables a spectator to receive the full force of
the impression aimed at in any given passage if
he enters the theatre for that passage alone. The
success of such plays depends upon the exercise
by the audience of powers of memory, imagina-
tion, insight, reasoning, and sympathy, which only
a small minority of the playgoing public at pre-
sent possesses. To the rest the higher drama is
as disagreeably perplexing as the game of chess
is to a man who has barely enough capacity to
understand skittles. Consequently, just as we
have the chess club and the skittle alley pros-
pering side by side, we shall have the theatre
of Shakespear, Moliere, Goethe, and Ibsen pros-
pering alongside that of Henry Arthur Jones
and Gilbert ; of Sardou, Grundy, and Pinero ; of
Buchanan and Ohnet, as naturally as these
already prosper alongside that of Pettit and
Sims, which again does no more harm to the
music halls than the music halls do to the wax-
works or even the ratpit, although this last is
dropping into the limbo of discarded brutalities
by the same progressive movement that has led
the intellectual playgoer to discard Sardou and
take to Ibsen. It has often been said that
political parties progress serpent-wise, the tail
being to-day where the head was formerly, yet
K

146 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenism.

never overtaking the head. The same figure
may be appHed to grades of playgoers, with the
reminder that this sort of serpent grows at the
head and drops off joints of his tail as he glides
along. Therefore it is not only inevitable that
new theatres should be built for the new first
class of playgoers, but that the best of the
existing theatres should be gradually converted
to their use, even at the cost of ousting, in spite
of much angry protest, the old patrons who are
being left behind by the movement.

The resistance of the old playgoers to the new
plays will be supported by the elder managers, the
elder actors, and the elder critics. One manager
pities Ibsen for his ignorance of effective play-
writing, and declares that he can see exactly
what ought to have been done to make a real
play of Hedda Gablei^. His case is parallel to
that of Mr Henry Irving, who saw exactly what
ought to have been done to make a real play
of Goethe's Faust, and got Mr Wills to do it. A
third manager, repelled and disgusted by Ibsen,
condemns Hedda as totally deficient in elevating
moral sentiment. One of the plays which he
prefers is Sardou's La Tosca ! Clearly these
three representative gentlemen, all eminent both
as actors and managers, will hold by the con-
ventional drama until the commercial success of
Ibsen forces them to recognize that in the course

Appendix. 147

of nature they are falling behind the taste of the
day. Mr Thorne, at the Vaudeville Theatre, was
the first leading manager who ventured to put a
play of Ibsen's into his evening bill ; and he did
not do so until Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss
Marion Lea had given ten experimental perfor-
mances at his theatre at their own risk. Mr
Charrington and Miss Janet Achurch, who, long
before that, staked their capital and reputation
on A DolVs Hoiise^ had to take a theatre and go
into management themselves for the purpose.
The production of Rosmershobn was not a
managerial enterprise in the ordinary sense at
all : it was an experiment made by Miss Farr,
who played Rebecca — an experiment, too, which
was considerably hampered by the refusal of the
London managers to allow members of their
companies to take part in the performance. In
short, the senior division would have nothing to
say for themselves in the matter of the one
really progressive theatrical movement of their
time, but for the fact that Mr W. H. Vernon's
effort to obtain a hearing for Pillars of Society
in 1880 was the occasion of the first appearance
of the name of Ibsen on an English playbill.

But it had long been obvious that the want
of a playhouse at which the aims of the manage-
ment should be unconditionally artistic was not
likely to be supplied either at our purely com-

148 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenism.

mercial theatres or at those governed by actor-
managers reigning absolutely over all the other
actors, a power which a young man abuses to
provide opportunities for himself, and which an
older man uses in an old-fashioned way. Mr
William Archer, in an article in the FortnigJitly
Reviczv^ invited private munificence to endow
a National Theatre ; and some time later a
young Dutchman, Mr J. T. Grein, an enthusiast
in theatrical art, came forward with a somewhat
similar scheme. Private munificence remained
irresponsive — fortunately, one must think, since
it was a feature of both plans that the manage-
ment of the endowed theatre should be handed
over to committees of managers and actors of
established reputation —in other words, to the
very people whose deficiencies have created the
whole difficulty. Mr Grein, however, being pre-
pared to take any practicable scheme in hand
himself, soon saw the realities of the situation well
enough to understand that to wait for the float-
ing of a fashionable Utopian enterprise, with
the Prince of Wales as President and a capital
of at least ^20,000, would be to wait for ever.
He accordingly hired a cheap public hall in
Tottenham Court Road, and, though his re-
sources fell far short of those with which an
ambitious young professional man ventures upon
giving a dance, made a bold start by announcing

Appendix. 149

a performance of Gliosis to inaugurate " The
Independent Theatre" on the lines of the
Theatre Libre of Paris. The result was that he
received sufficient support both in money and
gratuitous professional aid to enable him to give
the performance at the Royalty I'heatre ; and
throughout the following week he shared with
Ibsen the distinction of being abusively dis-
cussed to an extent that must have amply con-
vinced him that his efforts had not passed
unheeded. Possibly he may have counted on
being handled generously for the sake of his
previous services in obtaining some considera-
tion for the contemporary English drama on the
continent, even to the extent of bringing about
the translation and production in foreign theatres
of some of the most popular of our recent
plays ; but if he had any such hope it was not
fulfilled ; for he received no quarter whatever.
And at present it is clear that unless those
who appreciate the service he has rendered to
theatrical art in England support him as ener-
getically as his opponents attack him, it will be
impossible for him to maintain the performances
of the Independent Theatre at the pitch of
efficiency and frequency which will be needed
if it is to have any wide effect on the taste
and seriousness of the playgoing public. One
of the most formidable and exasperating ob-

150 The Qjiintessence of Ibsenism.

stacks in his way is the detestable censorship
exercised by the official licenser of plays, a
public nuisance of which it seems impossible to
rid ourselves under existing Parliamentary con-
ditions. The licenser has the London theatres
at his mercy through his power to revoke their
licenses ; and he is empowered to exact a fee
for reading each play submitted to him, so that
his income depends on his allowing no play to
be produced without going through that ordeal.
As these powers are granted to him in order
that he may forbid the performance of plays
which would have an injurious effect on public
morals, the unfortunate gentleman is bound in
honour to try to do his best to keep the stage
in the right path — which he of course can set
about in no other way than by making it a
reflection of his individual views, which are
necessarily dictated by his temperament and by
the political and pecuniary interests of his class.
This he does not dare to do : self-mistrust and
the fear of public opinion paralyze him when-
ever either the strong hand or the open mind
claims its golden opportunity ; and the net
result is that indecency and vulgarity are ram-
pant on the London stage, from which flows
the dramatic stream that irrigates the whole
country ; whilst Shelley's Cenci tragedy and
Ibsen's Ghosts are forbidden, and have in fact

Appendix, 1 5 1

only been performed once "in private": that is,
before audiences of invited non-paying guests.
It is now so well understood that only plays of
the commonest idealist type can be sure of a
license in London, that the novel and not the
drama is the form adopted as a matter of course
by thoughtful masters of fiction. The merits of
the case ought to be too obvious to need re-
stating : it is plain that every argument that
supports a censorship of the stage supports with
tenfold force a censorship of the press, which is
admittedly an abomination. What is wanted is the
entire abolition of the censorship and the estab-
lishment of Free Art in the sense in which we
speak of Free Trade. There is not the slightest
ground for protecting theatres against the com-
petition of music halls, or for denying to Mr Grein
as a theatrical e^ttrepreneiir the freedom he would
enjoy as a member of a publishing firm. In the
absence of a censorship a manager can be pro-
secuted for an offence against public morals, just
as a publisher can. At present, though managers
may not touch Shelley or Ghosts, they find no
difficulty in obtaining official sanction, practi-
cally amounting to indemnity, for indecencies
from which our uncensured novels are perfectly
free. The truth is that the real support of the
censorship comes from those Puritans who regard
Art as a department of original sin. To them

152 The Quintessence of Ibsenzsm.

the theatre is an unmixed evil, and every restric-
tion on it a gain to the cause of righteousness.
Against them stand those who regard Art in all
its forms as a department of religion. The Holy
War between the two sides has played a con-
siderable part in the history of England, and is
just now being prosecuted with renewed vigour
by the Puritans. If their opponents do not dis-
play equal energy, it is quite possible that we
shall presently have a reformed censorship ten
times more odious than the existing one, the
very absurdity of which causes it to be exercised
with a halfheartedness that prevents the licenser
from doing his worst as well as his best. The
wise policy for the friends of Art just now is
to use the Puritan agitation in order to bring the
matter to an issue, and then to make a vigorous
effort to secure that the upshot shall be the total
abolition of the censorship.

As it is with the actors and managers, so it is
with the critics : the supporters of Ibsen are the
younger men. In the main, however, the Press
follows the managers instead of leading them.
The average newspaper dramatic critic is not
a Lessing, a Lamb, or a Lewes : there was a
time when he was not necessarily even an accus-
tomed playgoer, but simply a member of the
reporting or literary staff told off for theatre duty
without any question as to his acquaintance with

Appendix. 153

dramatic literature. At present, though the
special nature of his function is so far beginning
to be recognized that appointments of the kind
usually fall now into the hands of inveterate
frequenters of the theatre, yet he is still little
more than the man who supplies accounts of
what takes place in the playhouses just as his
colleague supplies accounts of what takes place
at the police court — an important difference,
however, being that the editor, who generally
cares little about Art and knows less, will himself
occasionally criticise, or ask one of his best
writers to criticise, a remarkable police case,
whereas he never dreams of theatrical art as a
subject upon which there could be any editorial
policy. Sir Edwin Arnold's editorial attack on
Ibsen was due to the accidental circumstance
that he, like Richelieu, writes verses between
whiles. In fact, the " dramatic critic " of a news-
paper, in ordinary circumstances, is at his best
a good descriptive reporter, and at his worst a
mere theatrical newsman. As such he is a person
of importance among actors and managers, and
of no importance whatever elsewhere. Naturally
he frequents the circles in which alone he is made
much of; and by the time he has seen so many
performances that he has formed some critical
standards in spite of himself, he has also enrolled
among his personal acquaintances every actor

1 54 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenism.

and manager of a few years' standing, and
become engaged in all the private likes and
dislikes, the quarrels and friendships, in a word,
in all the partialities which personal relations
involve, at which point the value of his ver-
dicts may be imagined. Add to this that if he
has the misfortune to be attached to a paper
to which theatrical advertisements are an object,
or of which the editor and proprietors (or their
wives) do not hesitate to incur obligations to
managers by asking for complimentary admis-
sions, he may often have to choose between
making himself agreeable and forfeiting his post.
So that he is not always to be relied on even as
a newsman where the plain truth would give
offence to any individual.

Behind all the suppressive forces with which
the critic has to contend comes the law of libel.
Every adverse criticism of a public performer is
a libel ; and any agreement among the critics
to boycott artists who appeal to the law is a
conspiracy. Of course the boycott does take
place to a certain extent ; for if an artist,
manager, or agent shews any disposition to
retort to what is called a " slating " by a lawyer's
letter, the critic, who cannot for his own sake ex-
pose his employers to the expenses of an action
or the anxiety attending the threat of one, will
be tempted to shun the danger by simply never

Appendix. 1 5 5

again referring to the litigiously disposed person.
But although this at first sight seems to suffi-
ciently guarantee the freedom of criticism (for
most public persons would suffer more from
being ignored by the papers than from being
attacked in them, however abusively) its opera-
tion is really restricted on the one side to the
comparatively few and powerful critics who are
attached to important papers at a fixed salary,
and on the other to those cntreprenetirs and
artists about whom the public is not impera-
tively curious. Most critics get paid for their
notices at so much per column or per line, so
that their incomes depend on the quantity they
write. Under these conditions they fine them-
selves every time they ignore a performance.
Again, a dramatist or a manager may attain such
a position that his enterprises form an indis-
pensable part of the news of the day. He can
then safely intimidate a hostile critic by a threat
of legal proceedings, knowing that the paper can
afford neither to brave nor ignore him. The
late Charles Reade, for example, was a most
dangerous man to criticize adversely ; but the
very writers against whom he took actions found
it impossible to boycott him ; and what Reade did
out of a natural overflow of indignant pugnacity,
some of our more powerful artistic entreprenejirs
occasionally threaten to do now after a deliberate

1 56 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.

calculation of the advantages of their position.
If legal proceedings are actually taken, and the
case is not, as usual, compromised behind the
scenes, the uncertainty of the law receives its
most extravagant illustration from a couple of
lawyers arguing a question of fine art before a
jury of men of business. Even if the critic were
a capable speaker and pleader, which he is not
in the least likely to be, he would be debarred
from conducting his own case by the fact that
his comparatively wealthy employer and not
himself would be the defendant in the case. In
short, the law is against straightforward criticism
at the very points where it is most needed ; and
though it is true that an ingenious and witty
writer can make any artist or performance acutely
ridiculous in the eyes of ingenious and witty
people without laying himself open to an action,
and indeed with every appearance of good-
humoured indulgence, such applications of wit
and ingenuity do criticism no good; whilst in
any case they offer no remedy to the plain
critic writing for plain readers.

All this does not mean that the entire Press is
hopelessly corrupt in its criticism of Art. But it
certainly does mean that the odds against the
independence of the Press critic are so heavy
that no man can maintain it completely with-
out a force of character and a personal autho-

Appendix. 157

rity which are rare in any profession, and which
in most of them can command higher pecuniary
terms and prospects than any which journaHsm
can offer. The final degrees of thoroughness
have no market value on the Press ; for, other
things being equal, a journal with a critic who
is goodhumoured and compliant will have no
fewer readers than one with a critic who is in-
flexible where the interests of Art and the public
are concerned. I do not exaggerate or go
beyond the warrant of my own experience when
I say that unless a critic is prepared not only
to do much more work than the public will
pay him for, but to risk his livelihood every
time he strikes a serious blow at the powerful
interests vested in artistic abuses of all kinds
(conditions which in the long run tire out the
strongest man), he must submit to compromises
which detract very considerably from the trust-
worthiness of his criticism. Even the critic
who is himself in a position to brave these
risks must find a sympathetic and courageous
editor-proprietor who will stand by him without
reference to the commercial advantage — or dis-
advantage — of his incessant warfare. As all
the economic conditions of our society tend to
throw our journals more and more into the
hands of successful moneymakers, the exceed-
ing scarcity of this lucky combination of reso-

158 The Qutiitessejzce of Ibsenisnt.

lute, capable, and incorruptible critic, sympathetic
editor, and disinterested and courageous pro-
prietor, can hardly be appreciated by those who
only know the world of journalism through its
black and white veil.

On the whole, though excellent criticisms are
written every week by men who, either as writers
distinguished in other branches of literature and
journalism, or as civil servants, are practically
independent of this or that particular appoint-
ment as dramatic critic (not to mention the
few whom strong vocation and force of character
have rendered incorruptible) there remains a
great mass of newspaper reports of theatrical
events which is only called dramatic criticism by
courtesy. Among the critics properly so called
opinions are divided about Ibsen in the inevit-
able way into Philistine, idealist, and realist
(more or less). Just at present the cross firing
between them is rather confusing. Without being
necessarily an Ibsenist, a critic may see at a
glance that abuse of the sort quoted on page 89
is worthless ; and he may for the credit of his
cloth attack it on that ground. Thus we have Mr
A. B. Walkley, of TJie Speaker^ one of the most
able and independent of our critics, provoking
Mr Clement Scott beyond measure by alluding
to the writers who had just been calling the
admirers of Ibsen " muck-ferreting dogs ", as

Appendix. 1 59

" these gentry ", with a good-humoured but very
perceptible contempt for their literary attain-
ments. Thereupon Mr Scott publishes a vindi-
cation of the literateness of that school, of which
Mr Walkley makes unmerciful fun. But Mr
Walkley is by no means committed to Ibsenism
by his appreciation of Ibsen's status as an
artist, much less by his depreciation of the lite-
rary status of Ibsen's foes. On the other hand
there is Mr Frederick Wed more, a professed
admirer of Balzac, conceiving such a violent
antipathy to Ibsen that he almost echoes Sir
Edwin Arnold, whose denunciations are at least
as applicable to the author of Vantrin as to the
author of Gliosis. Mr George Moore, accus-
tomed to fight on behalf of Zola against the
men who are now attacking Ibsen, takes the
field promptly against his old enemies in defence,
not of Ibsenism, but of Free Art. Even Mr
William Archer expressly guards himself against
being taken as an Ibsenist doctrinaire. In the
face of all this, it is little to the point that some
of the critics who have attacked Ibsen have un-
doubtedly done so because — to put it bluntly —
they are too illiterate and incompetent in the
sphere of dramatic poetry to conceive or relish
anything more substantial than the theatrical
fare to which they are accustomed ; or that
others, intimidated by the outcry raised by Sir

i6o The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

Edwin Arnold and the section of the public
typified by Pastor Manders (not to mention
Mr Pecksniff), against their own conviction join
the chorus of disparagement from modesty,
caution, compliance — in short, from want of
the courage of their profession. There is no
reason to suppose that if the whole body of
critics had been endowed with a liberal educa-
tion and an independent income, the num-
ber of Ibsenists among them would be much
greater than at present, however the tone of
their adverse criticism might have been improved.
Ibsen, as a pioneer in stage progress no less
than in morals, is bound to have the majority
of his contemporaries against him, whether as
actors, managers, or critics.

Finally, it is necessary to say, by way of
warning, that many of the minor combatants
on both sides have either not studied the plays
at all, or else have been so puzzled that they
have allowed themselves to be misled by the
attacks of the idealists into reading extravagant
immoralities between the lines, as, for instance,
that Oswald in Gliosis is really the son of
Pastor Manders, or that Lovborg is the father
of Hedda Tesman's child. It has even been
asserted that horrible exhibitions of death and
disease occur in almost every scene of Ibsen's
plays, which, for tragedies, are exceptionally

Appendix. i6i

free from visible physical horrors. It is not too
much to say that very few of the critics have yet
got so far as to be able to narrate accurately the
stories of the plays they have witnessed. No
wonder, then, that they have not yet made up
their minds on the more difficult point of Ibsen's
philosophic drift — though I do not myself see
how performances of his plays can be quite
adequately judged without reference to it. One
consequence of this is that those who are in-
terested, fascinated, and refreshed by Ibsen's art
misrepresent his meaning benevolently quite as
often as those who are perplexed and disgusted
misrepresent it maliciously ; and it already looks
as if Ibsen might attain undisputed supremacy
as a modern playwright without necessarily con-
verting a single critic to Ibsenism. Indeed it
is not possible that his meaning should be fully
recognized, much less assented to, until Society
as we now know it loses its self-complacency
through the growth of the conviction foretold
by Richard Wagner when he declared that
" Man will never be that which he can and
should be until, by a conscious following of that
inner natural necessity which is the only true
necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and
frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial
counterfeits. Then will he first become a living
man, who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism
of this or that Religion, Nationality, or State."
L

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