IBSEN'S LAST PLAY.
IT is useless to attempt a criticism of Ibsen's work, and at the same time ignore the fierce controversy that is waged over his merits by his admirers, and those who fail to appre- ciate him. One cannot remain blind to the fact that the Norwegian dramatist is regarded by a small section of the reading public as one of the greatest writers of the day, almost, indeed, as a prophet with a divine message, and by another—and rather larger section—as a half-crazed impostor, whose writings, if they have any meaning at all, can only be looked upon as the lamentable ravings of criminal lunacy ; nor, unfortunately, can we remain deaf to the vehemence with which these contrary opinions are expressed, for the dramatist seems to possess the unfortunate gift of provoking both his enemies and his friends into quite unreasonable excesses of violence or civility. We, for our part, have as little wish to be over-civil as we have to be over-violent; still, we confess that we cannot quite believe in the good faith of some of the hostility that has been displayed towards Henrik Ibsen. That his critics should abhor both his matter and his method, is more than possible ; but that they should fail to discover any meaning in the man at all, and can really look upon his plays as sheer drivelling rubbish, is hardly credible. It has seemed good to theta to feign stupidity in answer to the preposterous claims that Ibsen's disciples have advanced on behalf of the " Master ; " and the answer is not a very happy one. Ibsen, indeed, is intelligible enough to any one who takes the pains to understand—often quite too disagree- ably intelligible—and it is not by shutting one's own eyes that one can blind the rest of the world to his real powers. It is useless to deny that the man is possessed of a strange dramatic force and intensity, a weird and startling imagine- tion, and an unrivalled power of laying bare and dissecting the evil side of human nature, or the accidental disease of a single human soul ; and not only that, but that he has also the secret of presenting the problems of human doubt and misery in such a form as to arrest irresistibly the attention and set to work the imagination of his readers. That much an impartial critic, who neither likes nor admires him, is fain to concede. Unfortunately, the fanaticism of those who do admire, demands much more. And here we may remark that these admirers have done the object of their worship a singular dis-service in advancing the plea of symbolism. Ibsen's plays, they say, are all more or less symbolical ; his plots, his characters, with all their horrible
incidents and occasionally grotesque absurdities—which to the ignorant and uninitiated seem but the nonsensical dreams of a madman—are symbols of eternal truths. Of what are his plays symbolical, and who shall read their hidden meaning P Why, the same might be said of a nursery-rhyme. "Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross" might be called a symbolical poem, and a hundred deeply interesting meanings attached to it by so many different interpreters. What is the hidden meaning of The Master-Builder ? One of its translators says that it has none in particular; the other translator declares that it describes the life and aims of the dramatist himself ; and we have no doubt but that, with the] help of a little ingenuity, we could ourselves extract from it a very moving moral for Mr. Gladstone and the Home-rule Bill. To taunt those who are not of Ibsen's following with stupidity because they cannot fathom a meaning upon which his followers them- selves are not agreed, is a very doubtful way of strengthening the dramatist's reputation. The Ibsen school would do better to leave these symbolical meanings alone, and devote their defence to those doctrines with which their master's work is plentifully sprinkled, and of which the meaning is not obscure.
The Master-Builder, lately performed in London, is, perhaps, from either the literary or the dramatic point of view, quite the worst play that Ibsen has yet produced. From another point of view, it is far less disagreeable than Ghosts or HecIda Gabler, though we are not sure if it does not contain a moral more hopelessly wretched than even those dreary productions. The Master-Builder, Halyard Selfless, is a self-made man ; not an architect—for that he has never received sufficient education—but a man who has forced his way up from the bottom to the top of the ladder by hard work aided by good. luck. On the day that we are introduced to him, he enjoys a high position and the envy of his surroundings; and of all his little world he is the most unhappy man. His domestic life is wretched, partly through his own fault ; his reputation abroad as a successful architect may crumble at any moment, because he knows that it has no stable foundation. He has risen upon the ruin of another architect, who, together with a son, is now employed in his own office ; and it is upon their superior knowledge and ability that his success is founded. He is in perpetual fear of the real secret of his work being exposed, and strives to keep the Broviks, father and son, with him, and dependent upon him, by a peculiarly base manceuvre. The opening scene between Solness and Kale, Fosli, the fiancée of the younger Brovik, who is employed as a book- keeper, and whose love Selfless has secretly drawn to himself, serves as a keynote to the whole play. He does not love the girl, with whom he plays so treacherously, in the least; but she serves his purpose, and the wretched man has sunk so low as to find an actual pleasure in his wife's jealous suspicions, because he knows that they are unfounded, and because they seem to his perverse imagination some compensation for the real wrong that he daily does her. He has married above him; his wife has lost her two children, and with them every chance of happiness; and her devotion to her husband and her duty, in their equal combination, madden him. "I am chained alive to a dead woman !" he cries, in a moment of agony ; "I, who cannot live without joy in life." To this unhappy couple enters Hilda Wangel, the very embodiment of youthful joy in life,—reckless, almost insolent, in her beauty and health. At this point begins the dramatist's utter dis- regard for probability. We do not suppose that Solness's hypnotic powers, to which mysterious allusions are constantly made, are intended to be taken seriously ; and we can only wonder at the strange ways of Norwegian society. Hilda, who as a child of twelve has met and been strongly attracted to Selfless, suddenly, after the lapse of ten years, descends upon his hospitality. None of the ill-concealed misery of the ménage escapes her quick eyes, and she probes the wounds of Selfless and his wife to the bottom. The hero of her childish imagination is no hero at all. The man who built churches, and whom she once admired standing upon the pinnacle of his own work, thinks of nothing now but the low-pitched houses and the low ideals of material comfort, and is unspeakably miserable because the comfort is not for him. Such as he is, though, Hilda will take him she has made up her mind to be a bird of prey, to take her goods wherever she can find them, and to cultivate a "robust," "a radiantly healthy conscience." The under- standing between the two, after one or two false starts, is soon made. To Selfless, Hilda is the younger generation which he so feared, and yet "towards which in his heart he. yearned so deeply," all the joy and brightness of life which he seemed to have missed. And Hilda, though even her robust conscience" rejects the " ugly " weapons with which Solnees has hitherto fought, and quails for an instant before the chilling glimpse which she obtains into the soul of the unhappy woman she intends to rob, has made up her mind, if only her hero can mount once more to the place she assigned him in her fancy, to take him as he is. He makes the attempt, but his "dizzy conscience" plays him false. At the very moment of triumph and defiance, he falls, and lies dashed to pieces at the feet of his wife and the woman who had bade him climb for her sake. That, roughly speaking, is the outline of the strange plot, and we will freely confess that it does not do it justice. But the dramatist's habit of hiding plot within plot, and issue within issue, makes it almost impossible to give a fair idea of the main lines upon which his play is laid. Nor is it more easy to do justice to the vivid aperpus of character which enlighten here and there the dreary lengths of his inter- minable dialogues. The revelations of the self-torture to which the miserable Selfless submits himself, are horribly realistic in their truth to nature ; but it is that way that madness lies, and one had best draw back from exploring the dark recesses of that racked imagination. Nor is it easy to explain the secret of the rare touches of pathos in which the author sometimes indulges ; we can only feel with Hilda that Mrs. Solness's lament for the nine dolls, so far from giving cause- for laughter, strikes a note of such helpless sadness, that it beggars all pity.
But the moral of the whole play ! If one could only fancy that the castle which Hilda and Selfless contemplated build- ing together was really a castle in the air, an ideal edifice- which should harbour no earthly passion, then one might forgive much of the sordid tale that led to their resolve and its tragic ending. But the dramatist destroys all escape that way, and makes it only too clear in what spirit the two chief actors part for the last time. As Solness says of his own life, it is all "hopeless, hopeless ! Never a ray of sunlight ! Not so, much as a gleam of brightness to light it !" The whole play seems to us to be nothing but one desperate, raging cry of revolt against human destiny. The builder starts well in life, "a boy from a pious home in the country," whose one idea is to please the great Master Builder of the Universe, in whose- honour his churches are built. No happiness comes to him as a reward, nothing but the emptiest vanity of success, which success, he sees to his dismay, is only gained at the expense of another's failure and his own peace of mind. His crowning victory is only won at the cost of his crowning unhappiness. Recklessly he defies the Great Builder, and becomes himself a "Free Builder," to shape his life after his- own fashion ; only to find that he is clogged by chains every-- where,—chained by marriage to a dead wife, chained to a living conscience which he cannot kill. Still, the impossible, the idea of an impossible happiness on earth, beckons him on; and in his last desperate effort to attain it, his "dizzy conscience once more asserts itself, and he is crushed for ever. Vanitas vanitatum,—one knows the text well enough, many have preached from it ; but none have brought their sermons to a- more hateful ending, we think, than Ilenrik Ibsen. There is no good on earth, he seems to say; its conventions and its morality are equally rotten and useless,—neither beyond the- earth is there any happiness.
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