Ibsen and revolt

Ibsen and Revolt Author(s): Robert Brustein Source: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1962), pp. 113-154 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124634 Accessed: 05-12-2017 04:16 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Tulane Drama Review

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Ibsen and Revolt

By ROBERT BRUSTEIN In 1869, Hendrik Ibsen, then 41, paused in his dramatic labors to compose a short poem. He had left his beloved Rome just one year before to settle in Dresden (he was to remain in exile from Norway until 1891), and he had just completed his first realistic

prose play, The League of Youth, after having established his reputation as the author of Brand and Peer Gynt. Since The League of Youth contains strong satire on the hypocritical opportunism of the contemporary Norwegian Liberal, critics were beginning to charge Ibsen with having joined the Conservative fac-

tion. The poem-"To My Friend, the Revolutionary Orator"-is

addressed to one of these critics, and is a polemical defense against the current charges. In these verses, Ibsen affirms that he is still a perfervid revolutionary-but he then proceeds to distinguish his own revolt from anything in recorded history. All previous revolu-

tions, he declares, were compromised by their incompletenesseven the Flood, the most radical revolution of all time, left a few survivors aboard Noah's ark. For him, on the other hand, nothing short of total revolution will suffice: "Your changing pawns is a futile plan;/ Make a sweep of the chessboard, and I'm your man."

Intoxicated by an uncompromising vision of absolute freedom and purity through a total purge of existing life, he announces what he sees as his own part in this revolution: "With pleasure I will torpedo the Ark!"

Torpedo the Ark! No wonder Georg Brandes-Ibsen's friend, adviser, and best contemporary interpreter-thought him the most radical man he had ever met. Discontent with everything but a new beginning, Ibsen finds it impossible to identify with any existing parties, systems, or programs, or even to ally himself with any Copyright @, 1962, by Robert Brustein.

113

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

114 Tulane Drama Review

existing revolutionary princip vidualistic that it transcends p remember, should we ever be t pion of such things as women's for syphilis, how sublimely ind or political reform. As he writ

to be sure, it is a benefit to poss taxation, etc., but for whom is i

the individual." The distinctio sen's own sympathies are undi man, the agent of existing in with the needs of the commu majority: Karsten Bernick, To individual is revolutionary ma political, or moral imperatives suit of his own personal truth Master Builder Solness. In Ibse slave and master, so fundamen is inevitably a defeat for the o always attained at the cost of possess, in his drama, a highly revolutionary heroes, but on t he personally stands: self-real this conflicts with the public w go hang.1 All his life political parties tried unsuccessfully to claim Ibsen as their own, only to be met with contempt and indifference. And the playwright's response is perfectly explicable in view of his revolutionary position: he is hostile to all movements based on a social conception of man. In Ibsen's view, the Conservatives merely preserve a corrupted status quo, affirming exhausted traditions and outworn conventions for their own profit, while the Liberals,

manipulating a mindless majority, merely palliate an advanced

disease with useless nostrums. As for the Radicals, they would only change the shape of the social system, not the fact of it-the Ark he would torpedo is the very State itself. "Now there is absolutely no reasonable necessity for the individual to be a citizen," he continues in his letter to Brandes. "On the contrary, the state is the

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

115

curse of the individual.... The state must be abolishedl In this

revolution I will take part!" Such a revolution, of course, could exist only in the fevered fantasies of an Anarchist or a Utopian Marxist, and Ibsen certainly has strong Marxist-Anarchist strain in his nature. But even were such a revolution to become feasible, Ibsen would probably not support it, since it would necessarily

become a social revolt rather than the revolt of an individual.

Ibsen's revolt, in short, is so personal that it can find common cause

with nothing else in existence. For him, all movements are com promised by their collective goals, for all collectives-not only th State, but community, church, and even family-are the enemie of freedom, infringing on the natural liberties of man.

Considering the extreme radicalism of Ibsen's revolutionary im pulses, it is entirely fitting that he should initiate the theatre o

revolt; and we shall not confront another modern dramatist whose

revolutionary integrity remains quite so pure. It is this revolt that I intend to illustrate in this essay. In a career marked by multiple contradictions in dramatic philosophy, and persistent changes in dramatic form, Ibsen's turbulent insurgency remains his most important and consistent identifying characteristic from first to last.

Ibsen's personal rebelliousness, as we shall see later, is often checked by a corrective counter-impulse which helps both to discipline and disguise it; but even when his drama finds its most detached and objective form, it still remains the biography of his rebellious spirit. Thus, we shall occasionally find Ibsen's art taking a social and political direction, especially in his middle period, when the author is concerned with smashing hallowed idols, exposing the lies of modern conventions, and ridiculing the various pieties of the Norwegian community. Yet, it is important to remember always that Ibsen's revolutionism is poetic rather than reformist or propagandist, and that even his specifically polemical activities are subordinate to a larger purpose which changes little throughout his dramatic career. The great danger in Ibsen criticism is the tendency to examine his works in isolation from one

another, and not-as Ibsen urgently requested-as a continuous, consistent development. When we study this development, we shall be able to confirm his plaintive remark towards the end of his career that "I have been more of a poet and less of a social philos-

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

116 Tulane Drama Review

opher than is commonly belie

that Ibsen's revolt, like that of m total-which is to say, he is dissa and not just certain contempora est quarrel is probably less with community who dominate his p thority figure, God himself. Be ginning for mankind, one can g

fashion a new Creation more in ke

imagination. With this new Cre his art, the basic Ibsenist conf hero a rebel against God and its

the social structure but a compl

of man.

Before proceeding to illustrate the strong rebellious strains in Ibsen's plays, we must pause here to parry a more familiar view of Ibsen, and a more popular interpretation of his work, which are just the opposite of what I have described. For despite the efforts of a generation of excellent critics (Hermann Weigand, Francis Fergusson, Eric Bentley, Janko Lavrin), certain misconceptions continue to cloud our understanding of Ibsen's underlying purpose, misconceptions fomented by critics who obscure the playwright's more significant innovations while emphasizing his lesser achievements. Basing their views partly on the external facts of Ibsen's life, and to a larger extent on misconceptions of his less

impressive plays, these critics visualize Ibsen as a bemedalled

journeyman-dramatist, equipped with side whiskers, a portly belly,

and an impeccable family life, who becomes-after a somewhat unstable youth-one of the most respected and respectable members of the Norwegian community, and is finally buried like a celebrated State official. It is this comfortable burgher whom H. L. Mencken describes, in the preface to the only sizable. anthology of Ibsen's works available for years, as a highly respected member of the middle class, well-barbered, easeloving, and careful in mind; a very skilful practitioner of a very

exacting and lucrative trade; a safe and sane exponent of order,

efficiency, honesty, and common sense... .[who] believed in all the things that the normal, law-abiding citizen of Christendom believes

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

in,

BRUSTEIN

from

117

democracy

duty to the value in his plays.

of

to

virtu

On the basis of this im had any mystical side to his plays, adding that " tions of practical dram off stage, to building u

ever

gave

to

the

ideat

tended as a tribute, artificer of liberal,

truths and errors that have now become standard ammunition for

thi rat

attacks on Ibsen by know-nothing journalists.

Ibsen's early English partisans would never have made him the Philistine that Mencken describes, but, in a way, they contributed the corner stones for his edifice of misconceptions. To enthusiasts like William Archer, for whom prose realism was the triumphant

climax of all Western drama, Ibsen's greatness consisted in his invention of a new dramatic method, based on the French well-

made play, which finally banished the aside and the soliloquy from the stage, while to Bernard Shaw, the Norwegian's significance lay in his having introduced social-political discussion into the drama through the agency of a "villain-idealist" and an "unwomanly woman." This Ibsen, the playwright of realistic dramaturgy, extended ethical debates, and the emancipated woman may have exhilarated Archer, Shaw, and Mencken, but he alienated innumerable readers and, what is worse, infuriated a whole generation of succeeding dramatists. Some of the most impressive artists in the theatre of revolt, in fact, defined their work in direct

opposition to these Ibsenite concepts, while showing scant respect for the master himself. To Strindberg, Ibsen was "that Norwegian blue-stocking," a mere partisan of women's rights; to Synge, he was only a town artist who imitates reality in "joyless and pallid words"; to Yeats, he was "the chosen author of very clever young journalists"; to Wedekind, he was the breeder of a lethargic me-

nagerie of grey Haustier (domestic animals); and to Brecht, he was simply an extinct bourgeois: "Very good-for [his] own time and [his] own class." It is doubtful if the work of any of these

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

118 Tulane Drama Review

dramatists, excluding Yeats, w the achievements of Ibsen. Ye so firmly established that even Ibsen's poetry, vision, and fire Actually, the prevalent imag fact, for if it is relevant at all relation to less than one-third Ibsen's prose realism and polem the Ibsen controversy was rag to make the master's plays sup stubbornly persists, still cont reputation than any other sing ently poor production of his p Continental, English, and Am petuated by false emphasis, by teristics while ignoring the o errors-and to account for the sen's drama as a creative unity and excluding from our gener he wrote during his artistic i thread which binds his work which the author himself hint

Dietrichson, when he obser

changed my views in the cour My development has, as a mat ent. I myself can distinctly f whole course-the unity of m ment." When we extricate this shall better understand his app discover an artist who was alw a prose realist and who never piration towards the sublime.

I suggested earlier that Ibsen of rebellion, an element whic pressed, is never completely a form, Ibsen's rebellion is Mes

shapeless, expansive, extrava

and Emperor and Galilean. But

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

119

terpieces in this form, revolt functions in pla and objectivity. Similar of revolt suggesting hi sometimes through lyr fication, one must exp -seems at times peculia such heroes, when he is not deny that Ibsen so as much heat as his Phi

ple,

whose

revolt

identificati

against

God,

is

proval, by celestial ven Stensgard, the pompou vealing that he is guilt the wrath of the Lord has destined me for th munity as a demagogu With the single excep Ibsen's idealists are sub a pattern which prob

was

Ibsen's

primary

v

denying that Ibsen's p interpretation. When a the ideal" or to "hold frequently dismissed Ibsen, idealism is some Devil (an honorific for lies), while the rebel is derer whose energies o average man and a dang When we find this re safety of the communi ing over the happines precarious ground and denying the very term form, is dedicated to t average man to heroic s

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

120 Tulane Drama Review

which brought the charge that these the only ones. In Brand, disapprove the notion that th his calling; in Ghosts, he dem futility of advanced opinions; hope and despair over the pos from within. In A Doll's Hous riage built on a lie; in A Wild that domestic falsehoods, und

necessary to survival. He app

mann for exposing the diseased Stensgard and Gregers Werle is a commonplace of Ibsen criti

advance a doctrine in one pla retract it, with equal convicti

of unsynthesized theses and

versus compromise; freedom v duty versus the joy of life; tr ideals; work versus love; eman versus severity-has been the fr trinaire Ibsenite. If Ibsen is a culiarly evasive one; and anyo or ideological consistency in h Yet, despite the author's omni elusiveness, a kind of consisten the surface of action and stat bellion. To do this, however, w

of creation, noting the strong sign of the Romantic temperam and providing both their liter prising that this element has n Ibsen left so many hints about 1877, for example, he writes internal trolls), "To write poet over oneself." This seems to b the very process of creation w ceeding from an inner struggl confirmed this in somewhat d

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

121

written has the closest through, even if that perience," adding, in a tremely careful in disc and what one has expe

theme for creative work."

Experience, then, was the taproot for Ibsen's themes and characters-but experience of a very special kind. Rejecting that "personal--or actual--experience," which was connected with the outward events of his own life (unlike Strindberg, Ibsen very rarely exploited his personal biography in his plays), Ibsen was inspired instead by the experience of his inner life, the forces molding his intellectual and spiritual development. It was through analyzing this inner life, by probing his buried Self for faults and virtues and exposing his own character to ruthless examination and criticism, that Ibsen drew the outlines for all his major rebels. This technique of character creation can be clearly detected in Ibsen's epic period where his Romanticism is most feverish and his identification with his plays is less successfully disguised; and when Ibsen wrote his epic works, he was not reluctant to admit his close relationship with his central characters. "Brand is myself in my best moments," he writes in 1870, "just as it is certain that by self-

analysis I brought to light many of both Peer Gynt's and Stensgard's qualities." Self-analysis, it should be noted, also brought to light the undisguised Messianism of Ibsen's Emperor Julian: in this rebellious figure, he observes, "as in most of what I have written in my riper years, there is more of my inner life than I care to acknowledge to the public." Ibsen's identifications with his rebel heroes, however, was not confined to his epic period. Even after he switched to the realistic mode with its more objective emphasis, he continued to employ this method, though it is less obvious in his first two or three prose plays. He considered himself less "muddleheaded" than Doctor Stockmann but admitted that

they "agree on many things"; he called Solness, the renegade m ter builder, a figure "somewhat related to me"; and we do not n the author's testimony to see his resemblance to characters lik Rosmer, Borkman, Allmers, and Rubek, the rebellious persona of his last, openly autobiographical plays.

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

122 Tulane Drama Review

Considering his willingness to guard like Stensgard, in fact, I t suggest that Gregers Werle, t satirical portrait of the artist as ful not to press these identifica many Ibsen characters-superfic figures or general social typescept of himself than is immediat suggest is that Ibsen's conflictin

ters in two different plays, or tow

play, are a product of his mark Yielding to the pull of this amb

dulum from egoism to humility, f

sometimes unfettering himself through the medium of art. Ibs are merely the results of certain character. His attacks on idealism ings towards his own idealism; h severity of a confirmed moralist;

attempt to punish the rebel in h

The same thing applies to Ibs

his themes. For while Ibsen's pla an appearance of intellectual cert floundering in doubts and ambig ring antinomies with which he s the whole of his career. Temper moderate center, where contrar

amines first one extreme positio

dogmas but always forced int

then, is an idealist whose ideals plays. But this lack of system, on

evitable, though paradoxical, re Singlemindedly devoted to truth Ibsen has no illusions about the intellectual postulates, no matte reduced to lifeless conventions i fore, lies only in the perpetual Rebel must be careful not to ins

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

123

real quintessence of Ib tablished, for his ana current conventions o beliefs and conviction anatomizing its equall as

the

champion

of

no

o

tive assault. On the co and the words on his epitaph to his total dr All of Ibsen's drama cariously balanced bet ment, between the sub aesthetic, the rebelliou vides each of his play ideas co-exists with a functioning

both

in

in addition to their dramatic existence. The drama of ideas is

t

generally the expression of Ibsen's personal rebellion, while drama of action puts this rebellion into some kind of objecti perspective. For while Ibsen will often use a character to adv some rebellious doctrine which he probably holds himself, h almost never satisfied with mere ventriloquism. At the same that he advances an abstract idea, he examines the consequen of this idea in the arena of human action, demonstrating both theoretical power of certain truths and their baleful effect on lives of others when put into practice. At his best, then, Ibsen treat the drama of ideas and the drama of action as two contig developments which coalesce and enrich each other througho the play, deriving his energy, drive, and excitement from the and his detachment, complexity, and thickness from the othe his worst, Ibsen's manipulation of the strings is unsure or clum so that his endings sometimes seem equivocal or his character

consistent: In A Doll's House, for example, Nora's abrupt

version from a protected, almost infantile dependent into an a ulate and determined spokesman for individual freedom may s the drama of ideas but it is totally unconvincing in the dram action. But when Ibsen perfects this method, it becomes one his most original contributions to the modern theatre, endo

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

124 Tulane Drama Review

his work with a multi-leveled per by any other modern playwright.

Ibsen, then, is a Romantic rebel restrains his headier impulses to pression, and moral idealism by in his rebellion, and testing his idea and compromise. We have alread discipline results in certain vertic plays. It can be seen, from anoth velopment of his art and his chan The progression of Ibsen's career

of his plays. Works like Brand Galilean, are relatively overt ex

Romanticism, in which he create metaphysics out of huge, irregul with The League of Youth, and co phase (an eleven year period, end

Ibsen suppresses his Romantici

mysticism, and his concern with towards prose, objective reality, a lization. This classical counter-rh that Ibsen's art has been totally God is domesticated into a rebel a on the collective as well as on the

ical doctor becomes an importan of heredity and environment beg language becomes more thin and

more specific; the themes mor

drama takes on, first, that manip the well-made play, then, that pr Sophoclean tragedy. On the othe much less radically than is first app he has merely contained his rebe As if to prove that this spirit ha turns, in his last great plays, to h cal, and metaphysical concerns, d combines the Romantic freedom restraint of his middle years. To

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

in

BRUSTEIN

more

major

precise

125

detail,

periods,

l

discuss

cumstances under whic Any discussion of Ibse monolithic masterpiece

after leaving his nativ greatest, work of end

writings prepares us fo tial talent he displays tenders, for Brand is l a profound and origina achievement in Brand ture from Norway, for

creative power swinishness up

in his there

mother-in-law from R itual life there. I was o it-and for that reason desire for creative con

sojourn in Rome. Besi "indescribable harmon

wonderful, magical," h Goethe's before him, s sive Romanticism. Ibs fluence of Rome on h Brand had come to be w

its ideal peace, associat an existence in an atm

that

of

Shakespeare's

tions productive of Br freedom Ibsen had eve was later to find expre

of

the

bouyant

livsgl

Paris artist community On the surface, Bran Northern atmosphere to have to have little i world. Yet, the sense

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

126 Tulane Drama Review

encing is reflected in the play's inspiration ("May I not... point Ibsen later, "and say: 'See, the w nally conceived as a narrative p into a five-act poetic drama, a w unstageable that Ibsen was aston pany decided to produce it. For pure self-expression, had written iting demands of an audience or a theatre. Having finally freed

Northern vaults, Ibsen had at last discovered how to make his

work an integral part of his spiritual life. The solution was simple enough; he had to be the same person in his work as outside it.

Although in The Pretenders Ibsen had dramatized the conflicts in his own soul through a fictional external action, Brand was the most complete revelation of his rebellious interior life that Ibsen had yet attempted, an act of total purgation, in which he exorcised the troll-battle within his heart and mind by transforming it into

art. With Brand, Ibsen confronted for the first time and in com-

bination the great subjects which were to occupy him successively during the course of his career: the state of man in the universe, the state of modern society, and the state of his own feverish, divided soul.

The play, a storage house for all of Ibsen's future themes an conflicts, is constructed like a series of interlocking arches, eac

ascending higher than the last. The lowest arch is a domes

drama, in which Ibsen examines the relationship of the idealist

to his family (the basis for later plays like The Wild Duck

the middle arch is a social-political drama, in which he analyze the effect of the aristocratic individual on a democratic commu

nity (the basis for plays like An Enemy of the People); and the highest arch is a religious drama, in which he shows the rivalr between the Messianic rebel and the 19th Century God (the ba

for plays like The Master Builder). Pastor Brand-a reformi

minister of extraordinary zeal (his very name means "sword an fire")-is the hero of all three dramas, and Ibsen's supreme idealist, individualist, and rebel. In the tradition of the Old Tes-

tament prophets, and those apostles of religious purification wh

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

127

arise in human history t is remorselessly dedicate to be the "chastiser of t

viduals new

and

codes

institutions

of

spiritual

and dreamers; and like Christ, he is committed to the salvation of

pu

all mankind through a complete transformation of human character. Brand, however, is a very peculiar Christian, if indeed he can be called Christian at all. Intensely masculine, patristic, strict, and unyielding, he rejects the compassionate side of Christianity, determined to close the gap between what is and what should be by making human practice conform to spiritual ideals. Actually, Brand is more extreme than the most apocalyptic Puritan reformers, a Savanarola of the will who brings Protestant individualism to the furthest reaches of its own implications. For, as Brand develops his theology, he demands not only that man become his own Church, but-so strict are the extremes of his ideal-even his own God.

Man becomes a god by imitating God, but Brand's God-no "gentle wind" but a "storm"-is almost inimitable, being the pu est and most uncompromising of celestial beings. He is identifie with the Ideal itself, to be attained through the unlimited str ing of the human will. Because of his emphasis on will, the mor sin for Brand is cowardice and half-heartedness. Like Kierkegaa before him, and Nietszche after, Brand is disposed towards th

great saint or the great sinner-the man who lives his life e

tremely with a purpose either good or evil-but he cannot abid the will-less mediocrities who fail to be nothing fully. Brand' Devil, therefore, is the spirit of compromise, while evil is iden fied with the middle way of moderation, accommodation, luxur

ease, and moral laziness. Taking "All or Nothing" as his reb

lious credo, he has resolved to make "heirs of heaven" out of t

dull and cloddish inhabitants of the modern world, fashioning new race of heroes to match the heroic figures of the past.

Brand, who follows his own precepts with uncompromising in

tegrity, is himself one of these heroes-but at a terrific cost. Strug-

gling painfully to conquer any emotions which might lead him from the paths of righteousness, he becomes contemptuous of a

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

128 Tulane Drama Review

but the hardest virtues: for him ("Faced by a generation/ Which is hate"),6 while charity and hu ment of human weakness ("Was Thus, Brand finally succeeds in ings, an ambiguous victory whi both wholly admirable and whol disciplinary types, there is som his nature. Ibsen usually associa hardness (snow, steel, iron, ston (he was "born by a cold fjord in suggest his ice-like qualities. By painter, Ejnar, and his lovely f "mountain air, the sunshine, the

their pursuit of Southern pleasure

singleminded pursuit of the ide Yet, such is Brand's heroic stat matic power that, by the end of to his religion of "greyness," le

by Brand's side. It is in the dom and IV) that Brand's defective h tized, for his fanatic ideals of m his entire family; first, his mo

Brand refuses to visit her unless s

then his young son, Alf, a vict been refused the Southern warm love); and finally Agnes herself, ultimately deprived even of the while, Brand has been engaged in torn between his ideal and his l decision to be a God has left him Agnes warns him "He dies who s only accept the terrible implica die. When she abdicates her pain am free, Brandl I am free!"), Br only through the sacrifice of ev Shaw put it, through "having cau

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

saintliness

than

129

the

m

done with twice his opp Yet, it is only in the do emerges as a villain-idea treated his family with for a happy private life. political

scenes,

he

is

a

bri

to reform. Here, Brand individual at war with s ventions, its limited asp antagonist, in this dram sentative-like Mayor Pe "typical man of the pe enemy. The conflict bet expectations from their ual man, seeks the salva tion in his moral consc man, seeks the pacificat

to

its

material

needs.

W

wants to construct publ harder, wants to constru

Brand obviously express the individual against th cial, the spiritual agains

moderation and compr since Brand's following

sheets to the wind, capit pact majority by helpin ever, has not lost the b treat in order to assimi success has made him un In Act V, which forms the heart of the play, B him to be-neither a vill

tragic sufferer existing beginning of the act, Br

popular

commercial

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

pe

130 Tulane Drama Review

Church is about to be opened a

rated by the State for his servic have gathered for the event-vag of the old Church was some form apprehension "as though they h God." Brand himself is very mo is full of discords. His mood gr theological version of the Mayo ligion is merely an instrument o

unrest. When he warns Brand to concern himself with the needs

of the community rather than the salvation of the individual, Brand suddenly becomes aware that the Church is a lie and tha he has become a corrupt institution himself. Ignoring the Pro-

vost's contention that "the man who fights alone will neve

achieve anything of a lasting nature," he tells his enthusiastic fo lowers that the only true Church is the wild and natural world o the fjords and moorlands, not yet tainted by human compromis hyprocrisy, and evil: "God is not here!/ His kingdom is perfect

freedom."7

Leading his people, like Moses, towards this uninhabited prom-

ised land, Brand makes his way upwards to the freedom and purity of the cliffs and mountains. But like Moses' followers, the people begin to slacken and grumble when the way grows hard.

The Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, had told the resurrected Christ that the comman man seeks not God-

head, but Miracle, Mystery, and Authority. And now-as his followers clamor for water, bread, prophecies, security, and miracles in place of the spiritual victory he promises-it is Brand's turn to learn of human limitation. When he offers them no more than

"a new will," "a new faith," and " a crown of thorns," they feel betrayed and begin to stone their Messiah. And when the Mayor arrives with the Provost to reclaim the sheep-like flock with a promise of food and safety, they repudiate Brand's salvation altogether, meekly returning to their secular lives below.

Brand is left alone on the moorlands, torn and bleeding, to meditate upon his mistakes. In putting vengeance, justice, and retribution before forgiveness, charity, and compassion, Brand, repudiating the "God of every dull and earthbound slave," has

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

131

pursued Godhead thro But while making him against the very Deity has turned him into s

it has broken the backs-of his all-too-human followers. Now

Brand must learn that man cannot be God; that he must live with the Devil if he is to live at all; and that even the freedom of the

will is limited by the inexorable determinism of inherited sin.8 Now, like Moses on the Pisgah peak, Brand is denied the promised land, and must await retribution himself. Yet, still he adheres to his ideal. When a specter appears, in the shape of Agnes, offering him warmth, love, and forgiveness if he will only renounce the

awful words All or Nothing, Brand refuses; and when the spirit is transformed into a hawk flying across the moorlands, Brand rec-

ognizes his ancient enemy, the Devil of Compromise.

Still struggling upwards, Brand finally reaches the Ice Church, a mighty chasm between peaks and summits where "cataract and avalanche sing Mass." It is Brand's true parish, for there, in the

ideal habitat of the extreme Romantic, Brand may preach his

gospel of the absolute, free from the human world and its compromising influences. When Gerd-the wild gypsy girl who has accompanied him-suddenly has a half-ironic, half-sincere vision of Brand as the incarnation of Christ and begins worshiping him as a God, Brand, at last, gives way to human feelings: Until today I sought to be a tablet On which God could write. Now my life

Shall flow rich and warm. The mist is breaking.

I can weep! I can kneel! I can pray!

But it is too late. Shooting at the devil-hawk with her rifle, Gerd has started an avalanche, and Brand is about to be buried in the snow. At the last minute, Brand asks a final, tortured question of

God: "If not by Will, how can man be redeemed?" And the answer comes from the heavens in booming tones: "He is Deus caritatis-the God of Love."

It is an answer which begs the philosophical question of t play. For if Brand's severe demands have all been wrong, a

man is to be redeemed only through Love, then the whole int

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

132 Tulane Drama Review

lectual structure of the drama co attacks on compromise and accom

and irrelevant. We must understand, however, that Ibsen is not

repudiating Brand's revolutionary ideals; he is only punishing Brand's revolutionary character. For the ending, while incompatible with the intellectual drift of the play, is perfectly coherent

in reference to Brand's human tragedy. We must conclude that the ending of Brand is an early example of Ibsen's failure to integrate his drama of ideas with his drama of action, a failure one does not sense anywhere else in the play. Up until the ending, one can regard Brand both as a great hero, saint, and reformer with a redeeming message of salvation, and as a flawed, repressed, and ice-cold human being whose ruthless dedication to an impossible ideal causes untold suffering and needless deaths. Up until the ending, we can admire Ibsen's extraordinary capacity for keeping two antithetical attitudes in his mind at the same time, so that he is able to exalt Messianic rebellion as an idea, while condemning it in practice. But at the end, he makes a choice, opting for love and forgiveness, and thus invalidates the intellectual hypothesis of his play. Still, even in this vaguely unsatisfying ending, one is filled with admiration for this defeated, yet triumphantly Godlike hero, whose eternal struggle upwards has somehow enlarged the spiritual boundaries of man.

We must conclude, then, that both the success and failure of the play stem from the unreconciled conflicts of the playwright.

For Ibsen's split attitude towards his hero reflects the clash in his

own soul between the twin poles of his temperament-the Romantic idealism of the reforming rebel and the Classical detachment of the objective artist. This dualism-fatal to a man of ac-

tion but invaluable to a dramatist-is present whenever Ibsen examines the effect of absolute idealism on private happiness, a subject that is to obsess him all his life. But though he will treat this delicate theme again and again in the future, he will never find a presentation of such compelling power and grandeur.

Brand catapulted Ibsen overnight into world-wide fame; and exhilirated by his success, he decided to have another try at the episodic poetic play with Peer Gynt. If Brand's character reflects Ibsen in his best moments (which is to say, at his most morally

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

133

elevated), then Peer's r ments (which is to say, charms and ingratiates. own fanatical idealism, missive side of his natu sun. The play-with its

occasionally Tropical reverse of Brand. Act

themes, treated from a of modern compromise sion, is very much like come to reform. And w urge him towards the h capacity, assuming the tent to which Peer falls

out

the

negative

techn

plays, in which not the move to the foreground Ibsen is also working o Century Selfhood, a sub does it mean to realize y dividual? The Hegelian is between Character an son's inner reality, the Peer's much vaunted Se public face, suggests he without identity. Peer, anti-hero. Infected with pared to adapt himself appearance, he must fi ice, truth in illusion, n of the drama occurs in

tingly discovers his mo illusion reigns supreme over external reality.

Peer's life, then, has be man, Peer began with a shiny button on the co

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

134 Tulane Drama Review

sidering his gift for fantasy. saint nor a great sinner, only buried under lost opportunit destined for the Button Molde

the lesson he had forced on

end, and gives Peer one last ch love" of Solveig,9 Peer's Self h that "to be yourself you must

deem his soul by a self-sacr higher than his own immedi sumably, the Button Molder

whether Peer has succeeded in

happiness of those around h

totally failed to solve.

It was a dilemma that Ibsen n artistic life, for he had decide Gynt, suppressing his own pe

preme dedication to his calli

momentous decision was his move from Rome to Dresden in

1869; soon after came a more tangible result, The League of Youth.

In this clumsy play about political maneuvering in a Southern Norwegian town, Ibsen's decision to embark on a radically new career is immediately apparent. It is a work without a single line of verse-without a trace of poetic feeling--dominated by the details and problems of contemporary life, and corseted in a tight five-act structure which recalls the well-made play. Despite its in-

artistry and banality, The League of Youth is, in many ways, quite typical of the new phase of Ibsen's art. In later years, he is to find another from of expression for his poetic impulses, but verse is gone forever.10 Gone too, is the extravagant sweep of his poetic masterpieces, and their self-expressive freedom. Ibsen has entered a period of extreme self-denial, which is even signifiedconsidering his affection for Italy and general distaste for the

Germans-by his move to Dresden. But it is German order,

clarity, and restraint, rather than Italian ebullience, warmth, and intoxication which have now become essential to his art.

For Ibsen has cast his lot with the "art of the future" which, he

has decided, will consist not of sprawling Goethean epics about

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

135

man on the heights of istic prose works about companying this discov

jective

mode.

It

is

the

concerns him, a subject youth is inappropriate; developing a chastened mate rewards of this d been tremendous. For settings of the fjords

ments

of

cluttered

dr

drama for the drama of of epic heroes for the p and housewives; the soa flat conversations in th took Ibsen some time t repudiation of the con filled him with uncert regretted his decision with his remorse), he n form. Probably remem mined to slay himself i desire for self-express

truth.

It is undoubtedly one o of modern art, the act Wilson's striking phras ture." Yet, despite his titude towards his art, Ibsen's conversion to Classicism was far from absolute, and his desire for objectivity was never quite fulfilled. Formally, there is no question that Ibsen's art has changed;

and he is extremely preoccupied, during this period, with the careful organization of "reality." But it must be emphasized that

Ibsen was attracted to realism for highly unconventional reasons-not because it afforded the dramatist an opportunity to document the surface of life, but because it permitted him to

penetrate this surface to the hidden truth beneath. It is, in short,

Ibsen's revolt-his desire to probe the appearance of things to

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

136 Tulane Drama Review

expose the true motives of mank many of his lesser contemporar were either phamphleteers or p sen's spleen is aroused principall between what is and what should

is practiced and what is affirm the lies which form the basis of while Ibsen's formal approach substantially the same; and while his drama remains essentially the Ibsen's prose realism, then, is p

beneath which the old thematic obessions still obtrude. In trans-

forming his art, Ibsen has not been able to destroy his Romantic rebellion; he has simply found another way to express it. He has turned his attention to the life of the community not to affirm it but to scourge and purify it, vindicating the rights of the individual against its compromising claims; and he has adapted the language of prose in order to discover a modern stage poetry, expressible through other means than speech. Even now, Ibsen's art is far from fixed. From this point on, he will be restlessly experimenting, developing, evolving-trying to create a form which will satisfy both sides of his dualistic nature. Since his rebellion is now more disciplined and controlled by form, Ibsen's art no longer expresses his emotional life as freely. But his aspiration towards

the ideal continues unabated. Even when the bourgeois upholstery is piled up to the windows, Ibsen's beloved fjords-the symbols of Romantic freedom-can still be glimpsed outside. Though he proceeds now by different and more circuitous routes, he is always trying to find his way back up the mountains to the pure,

free air above.

In Ghosts, the culminating work of Ibsen's "realistic" period, the fjords and mountains are still out of reach, but they can just be seen through the conservatory windows, providing a healthy contrast to the fetid atmosphere within. With Ghosts, Ibsen has at last gained control over his new drama, after the experimental bungles of The League of Youth, Pillars of Society, and A Doll's House, for he has finally achieved a perfect wedding of form and content. His success is the result of substantial technical experi-

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

137

mentation, for, after the techniques of the

grated

structure

of

longer bothered by th Plotted without sensa sions, Ghosts contains Youth), no death ship (as in Pillars of Society in the mailbox (as in A

son

has

Oedipus,

observed,

th

beginning

proceeding,

like

a

at

detect

past, to a terrible and fection of form, one n

between the drama of ideas and the drama of action-as one

does, for example, in A Doll's House, where a long discussion lows after the play has, for all intents and purposes, conclude Idea and action, perfectly integrated and conjoined, are unifi in the central image of the work.

The importance of this image is suggested by the fact that embodied in the title: Ghosts haunt the atmosphere-ghost Mrs. Alving indicates, in a crucial passage, of two distinct kin

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers th

exists in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of dead be-

liefs and things of that kind.... And we are so miserably afraid of the light.

Mrs. Alving's ghosts, then, are: 1) an intellectual inheritance-the specters of beliefs which continue to prevail long after they have lost their meaning, and 2) a spiritual inheritance-the spirits of the dead which inhabit the bodies of the living, controlling their lives and destinies. The dead ideas of the past are examined, and exploded, during Mrs. Alving's conversations with various members of the household, especially Pastor Manders. By defending emancipated opinions, Mrs. Alving combats, for Ibsen, the hypocrisy and conventionality of such respectable pillars as the stodgy Pastor, opening up such "forbidden" subjects as incestuous mar-

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

138 Tulane Drama Review

riages, pre-marital intercourse, male equality. This play of ide

prophesied for all ideas-has n

while the conflict between Mrs. a little too easy and simplistic.

But Ibsen is much less intere

generalized insight. And Mrs. Al as a raisonneur, but as a tragic su

It is in the drama of action that her basic flaws-a weakness of

will coupled with a limitation in understanding-are exposed.

For while she possesses all the right ideas, she lacks the Right Idea: a healthy skepticism about the power of ideas when not

backed with some form of radical action. Well-intentioned, liberal-minded, intellectually wise, Mrs. Alving is nevertheless unable to forge an effective practice out of her theories, lacking the courage to act upon her convictions. Thus, despite the fact that she is devoted to enlightenment (Ibsen usually associates her with a lamp, lighting up dark places) she is herself benighted. And like Pastor Manders and his Dickensian shadow, Jacob Engstrand, she is a hypocrite, her actions determined by the pressure of public opinion and the fear of scandal.

Mrs. Alving's moral hypocrisy is centered in the Orphanage,

which, like Engstrand's Sailor's Home, is a respectable looking monument built on a rotten foundation. By pouring Captain Alving's fortune into this building, Mrs. Alving hopes to satisfy opinion, ease her guilty conscience, hide her husband's past, throw off the Alving inheritance, and preserve Oswald's pure memories of

his father; but it is too much for that delicate structure to bear.

When the Orphanage burns up, it is as if all the lies of the past are burning with it (appropriately enough, Captain Alving's name will now be perpetuated in Engstrand's brothel). And Oswald, suffering from the last stages of inherited syphilis, is burning up too.

Her awareness of Oswald's disease signals the beginning of Mrs. Alving's education, a process which will not conclude until the play is over. She had always looked on Oswald as an extension of herself, someone allowed the freedom which she had been denied, but now she learns that Oswald is himself a ghost, an extension of his dead father, carrying the family's inheritance in his diseased

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

139

veins. Trying to fin Alving, Mrs. Alving Oedipus,

The

discovers

process,

that

howeve

Oswald's vision of the admit to herself that

and compounded her g turned profligate. Yet believes that she can s understanding, and de him about the truth o

murk

has

cleared,

th

Oswald is finally able propriately goes mad.

cipated

opinions

or

a

sity and Christian orig the action began. Mrs. Oedipus, she has disco

like Oedipus' killing remain with her hu

started inexorable des man will could no lon an act of euthanasia, a she watches Oswald id pure fjord landscape l

and

futility

of

the

enti

"The whole of mankin his notes to the play, tragedy of the Alving century bourgeois Eur to demonstrate how a

ingly perpetuated, cou conventional family b

Mrs. Alving's weaknes ligacy, Engstrand's hy

all merely cankered ern society. For whil really the victim of o

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

140 Tulane Drama Review

bound to result in ruin. Ghosts on Sophoclean tragedy, lacks o acceptance of human doom. So his heroes to the will of the go

and inhumanity of generati so the implications of Ibsen's

Greek fatalism: even his belief in will. For behind his convict track is hidden his secret desi which mankind can once again realistic plays, is not to cham show the need for it by expos cargo of modern life. Thus, ev jective work,12 Ibsen's rebellio

ing under the surface of his art.

In An Enemy of the People, istically within a year, Ibsen

through the realistic surface, pr

reception tendered to Ghosts. he had an opportunity to cool An Enemy of the People is the work Ibsen ever wrote. He had and some accuracy, that "in th

opinion, not a single remark

dramatist's account," but all o

"on the dramatist's account.

weakened by his hurt pride, Ib

quality of a revolutionary p

some peremptory gestures tow

is very much like an author private convictions about the

nicipal life, the tyranny of th of parliamentary democracy, and the hypocrisy of the Liber As a result, An Enemy of the art and an invaluable example Brand, who begins as a Messia

to Messianism through his grow

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

of

BRUSTEIN

modern

141

humanit

gathered admiringly world through selectiv

and

Christ.13

Becau

drama of action is alm ideas; and Stockmann whose defiant idealism of others. The play sh his reformist tenden critical dualism and t Messianic quality whic Despite the crudenes turing that sometime possesses a dynamism can boast, as if the au once more breathing tually the play is a tr later development. Ap restricting pseudo-im ready preparing to fo pression of his revolt really positive hero t

tate-but dualism.

he is too sim In The Wild

verely for this self-in satirical attack on the finished with the communal drama. Hedda Gabler and Rosmers-

holm follow, each dominated by a strong central character; and after this, comes the last phase of his career, in which the Mes-

sianism of Brand is adapted to the realism of Ghosts, and the works are centered once again on the divided, semi-autobiograph-

ical hero.

Even The Wild Duck can probably be considered as a semiautobiographical work, though it contains the harshest criticism Ibsen ever directed against himself, and is almost a repudiation of everything he had written thus far. In its more open form, its harshly satirical tone, and its unresolved conclusion, The Wild Duck bears out Ibsen's contention that "in some ways this new

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

142 Tulane Drama Review

play occupies a position by itself

But its novelty is especially clear is the only play in which Ibsen co revolt. Stockmann had declared, o

proval, that "all who live on lie vermin." Yet, Gregers Werle-a f

phors, attitudes, and symbol-mon

read each of the master's works

family, and succeeds only in mutila to follow Ibsenite principles, Greg

so mercilessly that he almost see

angry descriptive images, he is a "

crackbrained," a neurotic busybo

attack of integrity," "morbid, over

a mission, "thirteenth at table"-

unattractive man.

Yet, The Wild Duck must be interpreted less as a repudiation

of Ibsenism than as a corrective to it. For while Gregers seems to be

a typical Ibsenite, he is actually a sadly unbalanced one-almo

a caricature of Stockmann or Brand. His commitment to the

ideal, for example, comes from without, not from within, sin

it is the consequence of his conscience pangs over his fathe

sordid behavior; and he tries to realize the ideal not through h own heroic striving, but through urging exemplary behavior

others. It is a sign of Gregers' intellectual inadequacy that

should mistake that latter-day Peer Gynt, Hjalmar Ekdal, for superior being; but it is also a sign that he is a very incomplet rebel. For while Gregers may possess Brand's destructive fanat cism (his deadly effect on the Ekdals recalls Brand's effect on h

family), he lacks Brand's heroic virtues, particularly his in vidualism and aristocratic will. Ibsen is attacking the negat

side of rebellion without bothering to affirm its positive sidean imbalance properly designed to correct the reverse imbalan in An Enemy of the People. Thus, Ibsen-who has suggested fore, with much indignation, that the average man feeds on il lusions-treats this insight now with a good deal more equanimit

-not because he has grown more tolerant of the average ma but because he is more interested in attacking the inadequa

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

idealist.

heroic

It

is

claims

143

doubtful

of

idealism

these with his usual r refusing to be institu portant, in satirizing t

ples into rigid formula self--that indignant m for the sake of ennobli In Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, Ibsen returns to the

classical form of Ghosts. Once again, a dead person determines the

actions and characters of the play (General Gabler in Hedda; Beata in Rosmersholm); and once again, the rebel is treated with

equivocal sympathy. Hedda is even more morbid and neurotic than Gregers, and almost as destructive; but having recovered his sense of dialectic, Ibsen puts Hedda in heroic contrast to the bourgeois mediocrities whose lives she helps destroy. This contrast is even more striking in Rosmersholm. The action centers on isolated heroes rather than the conformist community, and the development of the play follows Rebecca's gradual transfor-

mation under the influence of a harsh but heroic way of life ("The Rosmer view of life ennobles. But...it kills happiness").

After these transitional plays, Ibsen leaves off scourging the

community, turning again to the tumult in the soul of the hero and becoming more and more subjective until he finally leaves

realism altogether behind. It is the last phase of his career,

coincident with his return to Norway after an exile of twenty-

seven years. The note of banishment is still struck-"Up here, by the fjords," he writes to Brandes, "is my native land. But-butbutt Where am I to find my homeland?"-but his last plays stand as a monument to an almost completed mission.

In the best play of this final period, The Master Builder, the religious, mystical, and poetic strains in Ibsen's nature, repressed through a gigantic exertion of will, have burst forth again, now contained within a domestic but strongly symbolic framework

and communicated through a prose heavily charged with ambiguity. Bygmester Solness is the most compelling of Ibsen's later, brooding self-portraits, a Messianic hero pulled down from the heights to reside in the community of men, and now painfully

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

144 Tulane Drama Review

laboring to drag himself up aga

biography; and, as has been of many such elements, culled f times even his "actual" exper

Wangel, for example, that vora

prey who urges Solness towar

will, virility, and potency, is ba whom the sixty-four-year-old p

called her "a May sun in a Sep the younger generation will

Ibsen's fear of being eclipsed by Strindberg, Knut Hamsen, and

his unremitting dedication to

happiness is a reflection of Ibse expressed in John Gabriel Bork Dead Awaken, about his own artistic dedication. And Solness'

development as a builder, proceeding from towered churches to "homes for human beings" to towered houses, parallels Ibsen's

development from his epic poetic plays to his realistic prose works to the symbolic, poetic realism of his last period.

The most interesting biographical element in the play, for our purposes, is its strong Messianic theme, which deserves special emphasis because it is so often overlooked.'4 In this aspect of the play (which dominates the last act), Solness emerges as another Promethean rebel, similar in many ways to Emperor Julian, who is defined by his amnbiguous relation to God. Long before the action begins, Solness haid been a pious and reverent man who

had tried to express his devotion to God by building churches

for His great glory. In return, Solness believes, God had rewarded

him with certain superhuman powers-"helpers and servers"which account for his fabulous luck and his tremendous will.

Though this interpretation seems rather far-fetched, Solness is not demented. His will-now somewhat diseased through remorse and

fear-is indeed an almost supernatural instrument, providing him with a hypnotic power over his employees. And all through

his career, Solness-somewhat like Haakon in The Pretendershas been unusually favored by circumstances; even his career

was initiated by a lucky catastrophe, for after his wife's ancestral

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

home

on the ruins.

BRUSTEIN

had

145

burned

down

Yet, ever since that conflagration, Solness has been in revolt against God. When his children were destroyed in the fire, Solness blamed God for trying to rob him of his wordly happiness for the sake of a more complete dedication to his divine calling.

Refusing to be the instrument of a celestrial purpose, Solnes repudiated God when hanging the wreath on the church tower at Lysanger, a negation which Hilda Wangel-who was present somehow heard as the vibrations of "harps in the air." At that moment, Solness dedicated his career not to religious monuments for the greater glory of God but to secular dwelling-places for

the greater comfort of human beings. But even as a "Free builder" he has felt no joy. Aline, his wife-consumed with self-reproach over the death of her children-has become a

frigid Death-in:Life. And since the community has no real use fo the homes he has built for it, Solness (like Ibsen) is himself con sumed with remorse for having suppressed his aspiration towards the heights.

Now Solness fears Nemesis-the punishment of God-which he suspects will come in the shape of the younger generation battering down his door. And so it does, though not from the direction he expects. It is Hilda Wangel, his youthful admirer-and not his

rival, the young apprentice Ragner-who knocks ominously on his door, unwittingly becoming the Angel of the Lord. Hilda sees Solness through the idealizing distance of her childhood

memories, and now she wants her ideal realized. Determined to

whet his blunted spirit, she urges him "to do the impossible once again"; and Solness responds, basking in the warmth of her youth, hero-worship, and Viking amorality. His will becomes

more strong and certain; his conscience more robust; and his

rebellion more defiant and dangerous. Convinced by Hilda that he is a superhuman being, beyond the good and evil of ordinary mortals, he determines to run away with her to build "castles

in the air"-though he is still cautious enough to add a "firm

foundation."

But first he must earn her love, transcending his age and de cline through a display of masculine potency. The opportunity

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

146 Tulane Drama Review

arrives when he builds a towe pinnacle on a secular structur

hang a wreath on it, despite his the religious aspect of the play, but an act of blasphemy, since it

Godhead. And when he clim

speedily comes. Dizzied by the h enthusiastic waving of her shaw

Hilda, applauding the achievem

continues to wave her shawl aloft, fixed on the hero but mindless

of the broken human being at her feet. As the younger generation breaks into the garden, she cries, "My-my Master Builder."

It is a great cathedral of a play, with dark, mystical strains which boom like the chords of a gigantic organ. Since Ibsen is once again concerned with a powerful central hero who wills his fate, rather than a victim of a circumstantial process, the work has a feeling 'of loftiness and grandeur which has been missing from his art since the early days. As a heroic rebel, Solness is in a class with Ibsen's epic heroes. He has no organized Messianic doctrine with which to revolutionize the world, like Brand or Julian or Stockmann, but his audacity and daring give him the stature that Mrs. Alving, Gregers, and Nora Helmer

totally lacked. He is, in fact, one of the strongest in Ibsen's gallery of individualists. Warring with God, he is finally conquered through overweening pride; but his defeat is a partial victory-he has also conquered God by attempting the deeds he

feared most to do. Ibsen's treatment of Solness shows that his

interest in objective rebellion is now over for good. The Master Builder is free from all considerations of biology, determinism,

and Darwinism (even the humanistic Doctor is now assigned a secondary role), and the play cannot even be comprehended in a purely realistic reading. Ibsen's symbolism has begun to dominate the action, making it suggestive and metaphorical rather than specific and concrete. For after building homes for human beings and finding little satisfaction in the task, Ibsen has now returned to the great towering structures of his early years-building them now, to be sure, on a "firm foundation" of disciplined

form Somewhat dizzied by the heights, fearful that his own

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

147

powers are failing, he on his career by return

life which, for so man his next two plays, Jo

the fjords, the mountai again, and in his last, W his way up to the height Ibsen wrote When We Dead Awaken in 1899, when he was 71.

Subtitled "A Dramatic Epilogue," it is clearly designed as the playwright's final statement, even though he is to speak, right before his stroke, of entering the battlefield again "with new

weapons and in new armor." The weapons and armor of this play were novel enough to have shocked a number of usually sympathetic partisans, notably William Archer who called it "wholly impossible," "purely pathological," "an exaggeration of

manner to the pitch of mannerism." Archer's dislike for the play-based on his conviction that Ibsen had sacrificed "surface reality to underlying meaning"-can be quickly dismissed if we remember his own peculiar prejudices; it was Archer who rejected Elizabethan drama because of its "unrealistic" asides and soliloquies. When we cease regarding Ibsen purely as a prose realist, we will be able to see that When We Dead Awaken is not

so much a new departure as a continuation and intensification of all his old themes, in which his mysticism, no longer concealed under an authenticated surface, has. become more rampant and

overt. In many ways, the play can be compared with Shakespeare's late romances or Beethoven's last quartets: the experimentation of an artist who is prepared to fall into excesses in order to expand the possibilities of his art. Like The Winter's

Tale, for example, the play is full of minor flaws, and often inconsistent in plot and character. But it shows no falling off at all

in dramatic power. Quite the contrary, it is one of the most

valuable testaments we have to Ibsen's extraordinary mind and

vision. And it suggests that, had he lived, Ibsen might have developed in the same direction as Strindberg or Maeterlinck, creating a drama of the soul to which the physical events of everyday life have been completely subordinated.

Ibsen's last work concludes the series of autobiographical

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

148 Tulane Drama Review

dramas begun with The Maste aging rebel, despairing of life periences an ambiguous victor

Solness the architect, Rubek the no longer satisfies him; like Soln to acts of great daring, mortally

Rubek, however, begins at a l any of Ibsen's heroes. Instead

of dedicated work and consumin begins with this awareness; and he is trying to weld the two op

Actually, Rubek chose the joy

the play even.begins. For after a

spend his old age in semi-reti wife, in a sunny Italian villa a busts of prominent men. Rube this aimless happiness; and Ma misanthropic, sullen, and indi

returned North to a health resor

near the fjords and mountain

chides him for his broken prom "all the glory of the world" from

himself for his lost opportunities,

passion which will give his old ag When he comes upon a mysteri

Sister of Mercy, Rubek thinks seeking, for the lady turns out the inspiration for his earlier m

At that time, his work had b Rubek realizes that in Irene h

resolved. The realization, howev had offered to serve him "in fr

the pulsing blood of my youth," that his art would suffer if he p

master, he merely thanked h

went his way. The conflict between

woman (a conflict Shaw was l Irene's spiritual annihilation. S

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

149

becomes the God of a world beyond the g

she

plots

to

kill

Ru

with her. Regarded b cidal maniac, but rea like a symbolic figur

While Rubek seeks his resurrection in Irene, Maia seeks hers in Ulfheim, the bear hunter. In the criss-cross structure of this

play, the husband and wife switch partners as in an unearthly minuet. As the embodiment of sensuality, joy, warmth, and life

(note the significance of her name), Maia is ideally suited to Ulfheim, about whom she notes, with a huge sense of relief, "There's not a bit of the artist .... "16 Both are healthy young animals with no desires beyond the satisfaction of their own immediate physical pleasures. Ulfheim, in fact, is a kind of satyr

figure ("goatish and lecherous"); and his association with the hunt-with bears, dogs, red blood, and red meat-carries over into his love life: he regards all women as "game." Nevertheless,

it is this Scandanavian Stanley Kowalski who offers to fulfill

Rubek's forgotten promise to Maia; he will take her away from

the "brackish ditchwater" and show her all the glories of the world, unsullied by "the trial and taint of men." Ulfheim and Maia, possessed with buoyant, Philistine joy, are from a totally different world than Rubek and Irene-the world of the living as opposed to the world of the dead-and even their mundane chitchat contrasts strongly with the charged mystical language of the sculptor and his model.

Rubek, too, has found his ideal mate, though for less exhilarating reasons. While trying to recapture his lost intensity through Irene, he discovers that, like her, he is dead, and "for the life you and I led," as Irene tells him, "there is no resurrection." Rubek's growing awareness of his own deadness is further illustrated in his stone masterpieces. For this work-"our child," as Irene calls it-is the main symbol of the "resurrection" theme of the play.

Like Solness' art (and like Ibsen's), the sculpture has actually

gone through three stages of development. The first, an image of transcendent hope and expectation, shows the figure of a young girl (Irene) rising from the dead and caught in an eternal mo-

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

150 Tulane Drama Review

ment. The second adds a series Rubek's portrait busts, they ha

pearance, but are really "pompou ated donkey muzzles, low-browe

snouts"-those "dear domestic

now thinks of the characters in stage, paralleling Ibsen's last auto himself is in the foreground, w prisoned in his "private hell," suf

life."

Despite this artistic insight i

("Never again in all eternity," Ru the statuary, "will he attain to f still anticipates both transfigura Irene. And it is her role to disill show him the vanity of his str she reveals, "we discover' that we despite Irene's spectral despair,

spirit of life, both are given a

heights to freedom. The two coup

night on the mountainside. Ire

"higher, higher-always higher." about to break (the winds whir

prelude to Resurrection Day") fulfill all his broken promises

peak. His will grows so powerful

even her intention to kill him the light, and in all the glitte

Promise." As Ulfheim and Maia r Irene scale the mountain togethe

But their climbing aspiration,

climaxed by an avalanche; and th up by the snow. As they find fu the spirit which no other climax of liberation from below, "I am f

"I am free as a bird! I am free as well. For, in this strange an of Oedipus at Colonus, the sculpt

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

151

a life of errors, on t gods can tread. Ibsen

this

final

ing,

one

testament

can

mountain,

feel

by

o

the

a

Rubek

It had been thirty ye must struggle till he d combat with the trolls

human and divine forces which would limit individual freedom.

His struggle had taken him up and down Europe, seeking a homeland, exiled in spirit from the modern world, while exposing its disease and corruption. And struggling to find truthful ex-

pressions for his double vision which would mirror both his

own subjective rebellion and the conformity of modern society, he had wandered from the fjords and moorlands to the civilized

plateau below, longing for the heights and raging against the depths. At the last, Ibsen had found his way back to the mountains where, free from the "taint" of man, liberation and revolt were pure and absolute. For to a restless nature like his, always

dissatisfied, always moving on, there could be no peace until death; and the total revolution he had envisioned in his youth could be realized only in apocalypse, in the pure, cold avalanche from the Northern skies. In When We Dead Awaken, the spiritual exile had found his homeland; the Messianic prophet has found his ultimate truth; the tired sculptor has found his resting place. And Ibsen, the rebellious artist, has found his resurrection, his ceaseless aspiration eternally engraved on the monuments of

his art.

NOTES

1 Eleven years later, in 1882, Ibsen is still carrying on in a si

vein: "I"Liberty have not the gifts gocondition to makefor a satisfactory citizen writes. is the first and that highest me. At home they do not trouble very much about liberty, but about liberties--a few more,

... ." he

a few less, according to the standpoint of their party." In The Play-

wright as Thinker, Eric Bentley suggests that Ibsen, like Shaw, was not only an individualist bxit a collectivist, "a believer in social, and even socialist organization"-but, aside from a few passages in Little Eyolf, I have been unable to find any evidence for this assertion. Shaw, however, attributes much the same views to Ibsen in his Quintessence of

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

152 Tulane Drama Review

Ibsenism: "Thus we see that in Ibse

lies through the most resolute a

Shaw's failure or unwillingness to Ibsen accounts partly for his conf

wright. And if Ibsen still remain

Shaw is growing to look more and

Welfare State, then this is because Ibsen continued to concentrate on

individual freedom while Shaw turned his attention to public and civic man. The two playwrights are really worlds apart, and the tendency to couple them is more misleading than helpful. The political differences

between Ibsen and Arthur Miller are of a similar kind.

2 I have used the term Messianic to describe a type of play for

which, at present, there is no other name. Though prototypes can be

found in plays like Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Marlowe's Tamburlaine, the genre is typically modern, directly descended from

Goethe's Faust-it is the most Romantic and extravagant of all rebel

drama. Its form is usually epic and lengthy (double dramas, trilogies, and even "pentateuchs" are common); its language is verse or a highly charged prose; and its hero is a Superman who aspires to be God and who, therefore, comes in conflict with the prevailing Deities. In this type of the play, the dramatist often turns visionary and apocalyptic, for he labors to provide a new religious-philosophical scripture more

appropriate to the modern world. Ibsen's Brand and, especially, his Emperor and Galilean are examples of the genre. So are Strindberg's To Damascus, Shaw's Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah, Wagner's Ring cycle, and O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed. But the Messianic impulse can be found even in relatively conventional works like The Master Builder.

' It is astonishing to what lengths certain critics will go to m

Ibsen conform to their interpretations of him. Mencken, for exam

asserts without a shred of evidence that Ibsen "lost his mind" while

working on John Gabriel Borkman, a fantasy he probably invente account for the mystical qualities of that play, and of When We D

Awaken which followed it. William Archer-also disturbed by overt mysticism of Ibsen's last play-speculated about it in a sim (though more cautious) manner: "One could almost suppose [Ibs mental breakdown to have preceded instead of followed the wr

of the latter play." Ibsen's so-called "mental breakdown" consisted stroke in which he lost control of his motor faculties. It occurred a the completion of When We Dead Awaken, and was definitely not outbreak of insanity but rather a form of paralysis. ' Shaw also reaches this conclusion by redefining words to suit h whims. For him, the "idealist" is one who worships existing conve tions. The actual idealist-he who, like himself and Ibsen, would str the mask from conventions and replace them with an unrealized id

he calls a "realist." Shaw's cavalier treatment of words produ

semantic confusion as bewildering as the medieval confusion betwe the realist and the nominalist. Yet, although Shaw anticipated that shall be reproached for puzzling people by thus limiting the meanin the term ideal," the misapprehensions about Ibsen he contributed now become rather largely accepted.

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ROBERT

BRUSTEIN

153

"Janko Lavrin reports a wright suggested that an on its own contradiction such, than in the conflict a philosopher.

"Twenty-five years befo very similar judgments i must be preached, as the pules and whines. I shun my genius calls me.... Let rity and squalid contentm sources for Brand might gaard, for he yields paral 7 Cf. the last verse of I also celebrates, in Rousse natural surroundings, fre

Now I am tempered l which summons me I have lived out my l here on the moor there are freedom and God, down there grope the others.

(tr. Janko Lavrin)

8 Brand is made aware of the limitations on the human will after

reflecting on the origins of his spiritual half-sister, Gerd, who is

covered to be the illegitimate daughter of a gypsy and that w rejected by Brand's mother. As Lavrin observes, this is an ea embodiment of Ibsen's convictions about parental guilt-convict he is later to expand in Ghosts. But even before this, Ibsen shows

awareness of the limitations on will. In Vikings at Helgeland (18 for example, we find this passage: "Man's will can do this thin

between free will rules and determinism is anthat unresolved afflicts that; but fate in the deeds shape one ourthat lives ... ." The conf

Ibsen throughout his career. " The phrase is used by Rebecca West in Rosmersholm. In that pla

as in Peer Gynt-and most of Ibsen's work-love is the one ideal

which the author does not question, primarily because it is the only force which the author thought capable of ennobling mankind "from

without."

0 See Ibsen's letter to Lucie Wolf (1883): "Verse has been most in-

jurious to dramatic art.... It is improbable that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future;

the aims of the dramatist of the future are almost certain to be incom-

patible with it. It is therefore doomed. For art forms become extinct,

just as the preposterous animal forms of prehistoric times become

extinct when their day is over... .I myself have for the last seven or eight years hardly written a single verse; I have exclusively cultivated the very much more difficult art of writing the genuine, plain language spoken in life."

Ibsen, always very much the dramatic poet if no longer the poetic dramatist, is overstating his position here, as he admits a year later in

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

154

Tulane

Drama

Review

another letter: "I still remember what disrespectfully about the ar of my own personal connection

moment."

" It is characteristic of Shaw, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism

see this technical flaw as Ibsen's greatest technical achievement an major contribution to the modern drama. ""In none of my plays," writes Ibsen, in the course of denying h kinship with any of the characters in Ghosts, "is the author so extr so completely absent, as in this last one." '" "I shall hurl my ink-pot at their heads!" shouts Stockmann, in apocalyptic rage, determining a little later to gather twelve ragamu about him as disciples to whom he will pass on the legacy of revolt.

"1 It is not overlooked, however, by Hermann Weigand who devot penetrating analysis to this "mystery play," as he calls it.

"'The similarity of Irene to Duerrenmatt's Claire Zachanassian

The Visit of the Old Lady is too striking to be overlooked. They n only share the same allegorical, non-human qualities but a number

specific qualities as well: Irene, like Claire, has been married m

times (to a Russian, a South American, etc.), was forced into prost tion after the conclusion of her relationship, and has now dedicat herself to achieving revenge on the man who ruined her life.

18 This phrase stuck in the head of Ibsen's great admirer, James J

who used it, in slightly altered form, in Ulysses. Joyce's own

Exiles, is, in addition, very closely related to When We Dead Awak in its structure, characters, and theme.

This content downloaded from 216.220.176.6 on Tue, 05 Dec 2017 04:16:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms