BOOKS AND WRITERS
GREAT dramatist, Ibsen, the liberating and tutelary genius A of what the text-books call modern European drama, and yet how hard it is to warm to him! What exactly is it that robs him, at any rate in the English theatre, of grace and intimacy ? Partly translation, no doubt. One is told that William Archer's versions of the plays, which are still those in general use, lack something of inspiration. That seems very likely. In per- formance a certain stiltedness of phrase makes itself felt—a wooden- ness of response in the dialogue—which one suspects of reproducing not so much a period flavour as imperfect skill or sympathy. It is Ibsen's poetic quality to which Archer as translator evidently did less than justice and which we have since come to recognise as the distinctive and shaping element in the plays. The quintessence of Ibsenism, it is plain to us today, is to be sought not in the drama of ideas, not in the moral iconoclasm or anatomy of society, but in Ibsen's, Dichtung. The Shavian interpretation was indeed Shavian, and has probably had, in spite of its initial stimulus, ill consequences.
Translation, however, is scarcely the whole of the matter. Is it, after all, a Northern Gothic gloom that envelops the drama of Ibsen, chilling English flesh in the theatre ? Again, in part perhaps ; imaginatively, his is the wintry and sunless temperament, it may be supposed, of Northern latitudes. Yet one warms to other Scan- dinavian dramatists who were his contemporaries ; to his rival Bjornson even in a slightly commonplace play like The Bankrupt (of which the Pillars of Society, Ibsen's swift and jealous riposte, was as it were a copy that eclipsed the original), to Strindberg even in his madder and more outrageous mood. No, it is surely some- thing cold and forbidding in the mind and personality of Ibsen that pervades his drama—the assertiveness, the great bump of criticism in the middle of his forehead, the lack of real sympathy, the poetry without love. His plays, or most of them, are great plays, searching and powerful, subtle in temper, which strike an echo almost every- where except in the heart. In re-reading some of them during the past few weeks I have been reminded of what Monsieur Gide said of Henry James: " In himself he is not interesting, he is only intelligent." That is almost true, it seems to me, of Ibsen.
I do not know of an attractively written book in English on Ibsen. The fullest study I have read is the two-volume Life, by Halvdan Koht, in 'translation. The portrait that emerges from it is of a difficult character, touchy, vain, sometimes venomous, always striving, the deep and genuine idealism of the man scored, as intel- lettual idealism so often is, by a protesting egotism and also by much more of the artistic temperament than goes as a rule with the highest artistic achievement. Ibsen's is, in truth, a sharp-flavoured, a pepper-and-salt and even vinegary literary personality. Even after his return in triumph to Norway he did not really mellow. What with his astute business sense, his rigidly conventional ways, his censoriousness, the hieratic pride in his own fame, his doting appetite, in the evening of his life, for decorations, he cuts, dare one say— so incongruous are the respective modes of the man and the poet—a slightly ridiculous figure at times. Nobody can mistake the porten- tousness that clings to the familiar portrait of the bewhiskered, old-fogey-ish lion in frock-coat and top-hat pacing the streets of Christiania on the way to his appointed table at his favourite café, where at his entrance everybody without exception rose to their feet. Clearly it corresponds to something in Ibsen, some defence • mechanism, that goes back to the disappointments and humiliations of his youth—something that insinuates itself, in one way or another, in all of his dramas. Adlerian psychology has a variety of names for it. - Mr. Janko Lavrin's " approach " to Ibsen* and his plays is of the psychological or psychologising kind. This, though without doubt it has its uses, is apt to be, I think, one of the more wasteful forms *Ibsen; An Approach. By Janko Lavrin. (Methuen. 12s. 6d.) t Seven Famous Plays. By Henrik Ibsen. The authorised English trans- lations, edited by William Archer. (Duckworth. 18s.) of criticism, which all too largely makes for irrelevance. " Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Strindberg," Mr. Lavrin concludes, " Ibsen, too, was essentially a ' schizophrenic ' modern." No doubt ; but one cannot see that that helps very much, since we all take it for granted nowadays that the creative tension between life and art involves a degree of " schizophrenia." How- ever, though he is a little wordy, Mr. Lavrin is not too fearsome a psychologist. What he brings out very well is the close connection of Ibsen's themes with his personal inner drama and, better still, the curious interdependence of the plays, each of which seems to imply the rejection of the thing he had apparently pleaded for in the one before—Peer Gynt thus following Brand, The Wild Duck following An Enemy of the People, and so on. Mr. Lavrin's analysis of the plays themselves is made to turn rather narrowly upon Ibsen's intellectual or spiritual condition of the moment, but otherwise contains much that is both just and perceptive. The general case he argues about Ibsen and his creation finds support in this passage from one of Ibsen's letters to his German translator: " Everything I have written has the closest possible connection with what I lived through, even if that has not been my personal—or actual—experience. I have aimed in every poem or play at my own spiritual emancipation and purification—for a man shares the responsibility and the guilt of his age."
So one casts back to the plays, of which seven belonging to the middle and later periods, representing the body of lbsen's work which is theatrically most telling, are now reprinted in a single volumet. The first thing that strikes a reader all over again is Ibsen's stage sense, his superb technical command and resource as a man of the theatre. His drama begins, it has been said times without number, precisely where the pre-Ibsen style of drama leaves off, but what has not been said so often and perhaps needs saying today, is that, within the exacting form of retrospective narration which he pioneered, he is the supreme artificer of the drame bien fait. Ibsen yields nothing in craft or calculation to Scribe or to Sardou. He studied their methods, it is clear, to enormous advan- tage after his stage-manager's experience in Bergen and Christiania. In reading the plays even more than in seeing them performed, one realises with what brilliant and persuasive dexterity Ibsen puts over his dramatic situations, including those which spring from a too -lavish use of coincidence and those which are just a little preposterous.
What, after all, is Oswald's cry for the sun but a coup de theatre, an abrupt and melodramatic contrivance to round off the moral of Ghosts ? Is Nora, a light-minded and ignorant young woman, capable of the sudden translation of soul which bids her leave husband and children in order to discover real life ? Does not the plot of Rosmersholm carry a hint of synthetic horror, of spurious depth ? It is possible to frame not a few more questions of a similar sort. The secret of Ibsen's power as a dramatist is that they remain relatively unimportant. Magnificently contrived, his plays are carried forward by an inner momentum ; his situations are devised, like a compressed spring, to uncoil with immediate effect. It is in pure terms of the theatre that he invests the human predica- ment of Mrs. Alving or Nora or Rebecca with moral significance.
This, it is true, too often leaves the spectator not greatly moved. During my spell of professional theatre-going I can remember only three Ibsen productions in London that held me emotionally. One was The Wild Duck with Angela Baddeley as Hedvig, a second was Hedda Gabler with, I think, Laura Cowie in the part, the third was The Master Builder with a cast among whom I cannot remember a single name. Peer Gynt. masterpiece though it is, has never lifted me, so to speak, out of a seat in the auditorium, nor has either A Doll's House or Ghosts. The Wild Duck sums up for me the best of Ibsen. Painful almost beyond bearing in its revelation of human vanity and the illusions that men, live by, it attains a poetry which is perhaps profounder than compassion. For only poetry
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