HENRIK IBSEN.
i.
HENRIK IBSEN, poet, dramatist, and theatri- cal manager, is the chief among the few Norwegian men of letters whose works find a place on English bookshelves ; and, for at least his more ardent admirers on the Continent and in this country, he stands worthily alongside the great poets of other nations.
It seems to smack of exaggeration to say that Ibsen ' is the chief figure of European significance tliat has appeared in the Teutonic world of art since Goethe ^ ; and yet it were hard to find a Teuton of whom this miglit more justly be said.
There has indeed arisen in no country, Teutonic or other, any artist so deeply imbued with the modern spirit as Ibsen. Perhaps none of the European poets has so thoroughly thrown aside conventional trammels of thinking as Ibsen has, and none of them has so fairly faced the great human problems of the century. There is no great poet in Germany, and if heterogeneous England may be called a Teutonic nation, there is not among her writers of Saxon type one of whom it could be said that he had grasped in an artistic sense the palpitating life of the civilised world to-day. It were futile to run over the names. Mr. Browning, vmparalleled as a psychologist, has never seriously attacked sociological problems. Mr. Swinburne has long ago turned his back upon liis too iconoclastic past. For serious grip of modern conditions one must indeed go elsewhere than among the Saxon poets. In comparing Ibsen with any of these we need do so, not on the ground of literary form, for here he is, judged by conventional standards, if not deficient, at least not conspicuous, but on the ground of strenuous thinkins; alone. And it will go well with us if on this ground we find liis equal among our own countrymen.
The dramas and poems of Ibsen have nearly all been translated into German, and five of the dramas have been translated into English. These are Emperor and Galilean (by Miss Ray — Tinsley, 1876) ; Nora, or the DoWs House (by Miss Lord —Griffith & Farran, 1882) ; The Pillars of Society (by William Archer) ; Ghosts (by Miss Lord and William Archer) ; and An Enemy of Society (by Mrs. Aveling). The three last have recently been published by Mr. Walter Scott in liis Camelot Series. Mr. Havelock Ellis, in his excellent introduction to the Camelot translations, divides Ibsens works as a whole into three sections. Historical and Legendary Dramas, Dramatic Poems, and Social Dramas. The most striking of the first series is Emperor and Galilean, which is a double drama, each part consisting of five acts. The subject suits Ibsen's genius perfectly. The spectacle of Julian ' the Apostate ' attempting to resist the new religion by becoming the apostle of a newer paganism, has special cliarm for a mind like Ibsen's. In the second category there are Peer Gynt, in which it is said that Ibsen depicts his own childhood, and which is regarded as a great national drama, and Brand, a poetic drama of Norwegian life, in which the ordi- narily commonplace existence of a Norwegian pastor is employed as a stage for the display of ideals of self-sacrifice broken by the pressure upon them of an unsympathetic environment.
It is his social dramas with which we wish now more immediately to concern ourselves, for there he unfolds in his peculiarly subtle and elusive manner his philosophy of society, and there also he brings skilfully conceived scientific ideas to aid him in following and describing the development of character. The Rougon-Macquart series of Zola is certainly a more elaborate working out of the principle of heredity; but it is no whit more striking an exposition than Ghosts, which compresses into a few-pages an example of heredity which burns into the brain. But Ibsen is not a faddist, the balance of influence of environment on one hand, and of heredity on the other, is maintained with scientific precision. One finds this conspicuously exemplified in Nora where the dolFs house reacts on the character of Nora, and makes her less of a woman than she had it in her to be.
The leading feature of Ibsen's work is its immense suggestiveness. His style is compressed in the last degree; and Ghosts alone might be expounded in a treatise. One would indeed rather send him readers than spoil their appetite by offering him up at second-hand. The reader of Ibsen must be prepared for something to which, perhaps, he has not been accustomed, that is, the treatment in a work of art, and in the manner of an artist, of matters which have been the subject of controversy. When one thinks it out calmly, there does not emerge any solid reason why that which has unfortunately been the sport of, for the most part, uninstructed and invariably one-sided polemical writers and speakers, should not be examined afresh from a scientific or from an artistic
