shaw, bernard - the quintessence of ibsenism

7/27/2019 SHAW, Bernard - The Quintessence of Ibsenism

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THE QUINTESSENCEOF IBSENISM: BYG. BERNARD SHAW.

LONDON: WALTER SCOTT24 WARWICK LANE. 1891


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CONTENTiS.


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PREFACE.

IN the spring of 1890, theFabian Society,

finding itself at a loss for a course of lecturesto occupy its summer meetings, was com-pelled

to make shift with a series of papers putforward under the general heading " Socialism

in Contemporary Literature." The FabianEssayists, strongly pressed to do " something orother," for the most part shook their heads ; butin the end Sydney Olivier consented to " takeZola"; I consented to "take Ibsen"; andHubert Bland undertook to read all the Socialistnovels of the day, an enterprise the desperatefailure of which resulted in the most amusingpaper of the series. William Morris, asked toread a paper on himself, flatly declined, but gaveus one on Gothic Architecture. Stepniak alsocame to the rescue with a lecture on modernRussian fiction ; and so the Society tided overthe summer without having to close its doors,but also without having added anything what-


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vi Preface.ever to the general stock of information onSocialism in Contemporary Literature. After thisI cannot claim that my paper on Ibsen, whichwas duly read at the St James's Restaurant onthe 1 8th July 1890, under the presidency ofMrs Annie Besant, and which was the first formof this little book, is an original work in thesense of being the result of a spontaneous in-ernal

impulse on my part. Havdng purposelycouched it in the most provocative terms (ofwhich traces may

be found by the curiousin

its present state),I did not attach much import-nceto the somewhat lively debate that arose

upon it ; and I had laid it aside as a pieced'occasion which had served its turn, when theproduction of Rosinershohn at the VaudevilleTheatre by Miss Farr, the inauguration of theIndependent Theatre by Mr J. T. Grein with aperformance of Ghosts, and the sensation createdby the experiment of Miss Robins and Miss Leawith Hedda Gabler, started a frantic newspapercontroversy, in which I could see no sign of anyof the disputants having ever been forced bycircumstances, as I had, to make up his minddefinitely as to what Ibsen's plays meant, and todefend his view face to face with some of the


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Preface. viikeenest debaters in London. I allow due weightto the fact that Ibsen himself has not enjoyedthis advantage (see page 56) ; but I have alsoshewn that the existence of a discoverable andperfectly definite thesis in a poet's work by nomeans depends on the completeness of his ownintellectual consciousness of it. At any rate,the controversialists, whether in the abusivestage, or the apologetic stage, or the hero wor-shipping

stage, by no means made clear whatthey were abusing, or apologizing for, or goinginto ecstasies about ; and I came to the con-clusion

that my explanation might as well beplaced in the field until a better could be found.

With this account of the origin of the book,and a reminder that it is not a critical essay onthe poetic beauties of Ibsen, but simply an ex-positio

of Ibsenism, I offer it to the public tomake what they can of.

London, /zm^ 1891.


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THE QUINTESSENCEOF

IBSEN ISM.I.

THE TWO PIONEERS.

THAT is, pioneers of the march to the plainsof heaven (so to speak).The second, whose eyes are in the back

of his head, is the man who declares that it iswrong to do something that no one has hithertoseen any harm in.

The first,whose eyes are very longsighted andin the usual place, is the man who declares thatit is right to do something hitherto regarded asinfamous.

The second is treated with great respect bythe army. They give him testimonials ; namehim the Good Man ; and hate him like thedevil.

The first is stoned and shrieked at by thewhole army. They call him all manner of oppro-rious

names ; grudge him his bare bread andA


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2.

Tlie Qiiintesse7iceof Ibsenism.

water; and secretly adore him as their saviourfrom utter despair.

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

Now compare the effect produced by Shelleyas abstinence preacher or second pioneer withthat which he produced as indulgence preacheror first pioneer. For example :

Second Pioneer Proposition. " It is wrongto kill animals and eat them.

First Pioneer Proposition." It is notwrong to take your sister as your wife.

Here the second pioneer appears as a gentlehumanitarian, and the first as an unnaturalcorrupter of public morals and family life. Somuch easier is it to declare the right wrong thanthe wrong right in a society with a guilty con-science,

to which, as to Dickens's detective," Any possible move is a probable move pro-ided

it's in a wrong direction." Just as theliar's punishment is, not in the least that heis not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else, so a guilty society can more easily bepersuaded that any apparently innocent act isguilty than that any apparently guilty act isinnocent.

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


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The Tivo Pioneers.,3

dominant factor in society to-day, is the DailyTelegraph. If we can find the Daily Telegraphspeaking of Ibsen as the Quarterly Review usedto speak of Shelley, it will occur to us at oncethat there must be something of the first pioneerabout Ibsen.

Mr Clement Scott, dramatic critic to theDaily Telegraph, a good - natured gentleman,not a pioneer, but emotional, impressionable,zealous, and sincere, accuses Ibsen of dramaticimpotence, ludicrous amateurishness, nastiness,vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, absurdity, un-interes

verbosity, and suburbanity, declar-ngthat he has taken ideas that would have

inspired a great tragic poet, and vulgarizedand debased them in dull, hateful, loathsome,horrible plays. This criticism, which occurs ina notice of the first performance of Ghosts inEngland, is to be found in the Daily Telegraph forthe 14th March 1891, and is supplemented by aleading article which compares the play to anopen drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, adirty act done publicly, or a lazar house with allits doors and windows open. Bestial, cynical,disgusting, poisonous, sickly, delirious, indecent,loathsome, fetid, literary carrion, crapulous stuff,clinical confessions : all these epithets are usedin the article as descriptive of Ibsen's work." Realism," says the writer, " is one thing ; but


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4 The Qiiintesseticeof Ibsenism.the nostrils of the audience must not be visiblyheld before a play can be stamped as true tonature. It is difficult to expose in decorouswords " the gross, and almost putrid indecorumof this play." As the performance of Ghoststook place on the evening of the 13th March,and the criticism appeared next morning, it isevident that Mr Scott must have gone straightfrom the theatre to the newspaper office,and there,in an almost hysterical condition, penned hisshare of this extraordinary protest. The literaryworkmanship bears marks of haste and disorder,which, however, only heighten the expression ofthe passionate horror produced in the writer byseeing Ghosts on the stage. He calls on theauthorities to cancel the license of the theatre,and declares that he has been exhorted to laughat honour, to disbelieve in love, to mock atvirtue, to distrust friendship, and to deridefidelity. If this document were at all singular,it would rank as one of the curiosities of criticism,exhibiting, as it does, the most seasoned play-oer

in the world thrown into convulsions by aperformance which was witnessed with approval,and even with enthusiasm, by many persons ofapproved moral and artistic conscientiousness.But Mr Scott's criticism was hardly distin-uishable

in tone from hundreds of others whichappeared simultaneously. His opinion was the


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The Tzvo Pioneers. 5

vulgar opinion. Mr Alfred Watson, critic tothe Standard, the leading Tory daily paper, pro-osed

that proceedings should be taken againstthe theatre under Lord Campbell's Act for thesuppression of disorderly houses. Clearly MrScott and his editor Sir Edwin Arnold, withwhom rests the responsibility for the articlewhich accompanied the criticism, may claim torepresent a considerable party. How then isit that Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright of Euro-ean

celebrity, attracts one section of the Eng-ishpeople so strongly that they hail him as

the greatest living dramatic poet and moralteacher, whilst another section is so revolted byhis works that they describe him in terms whichthey themselves admit are, by the necessities ofthe case, all but obscene? This phenomenon,which has occurred throughout Europe whereverIbsen's plays have been acted, as well as inAmerica and Australia, must be exhaustivelyexplained before the plays can be describedwithout danger of reproducing the same con-fusion

in the reader's own mind. Such anexplanation, therefore, must be my first business.

Understand, at the outset, that the explana-ionwill not be an explaining away. Mr

Clement Scott's judgment has not misled him inthe least as to Ibsen's meaning. Ibsen meansall that most revolts his critic. For example, in


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6 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.Ghosts, the play in question, a clergyman and amarried woman fall in love with one another.The woman proposes to abandon her husbandand live with the clergyman. He recalls her toher duty, and makes her behave as a virtuouswoman. She afterwards tells him that this wasa crime on his part. Ibsen agrees with her,and has written the play to bring you round tohis opinion. Mr Clement Scott does not agreewith her, and believes that when you are broughtround to her opinion you will be morallycorrupted. By this conviction he is impelled todenounce Ibsen as he does, Ibsen being equallyimpelled to propagate the convictions which pro-oke

the attack. Which of the two is right can-notbe decided until it is ascertained whether a

society of persons holding Ibsen's opinions wouldbe higher or lower than a society holding MrClement Scott's.

There are many people who cannot conceivethis as an open question. To them a denuncia-ion

of any of the recognized virtues is an incite-entto unsocial conduct ; and every utterance in

which an assumption of the eternal validity ofthese virtues is not implicit, is a paradox. Yetall progress involves the beating of them fromthat position. By way of illustration, one mayrake up the case of Proudhon, who nearly halfa century ago denounced "property" as theft.


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TJie Tzvo Pioneers. 7

This was thought the very maddest paradox thatever man hazarded : it seemed obvious that asociety which countenanced such a propositionwould speedily be reduced to the condition of asacked city. To-day schemes for the confisca-ion

by taxation of mining royalties and groundrents are commonplaces of social reform ; andthe honesty of the relation of our big propertyholders to the rest of the community is challengedon all hands. It would be easy to multiply in-tances

though the most complete are nowineffective through the triumph of the original" paradox " having obliterated all memory of theopposition it first had to encounter. The pointto seize is that social progress takes effectthrough the replacement of old institutions bynew ones ; and since every institution involvesthe recognition of the duty of conforming to it,progress must involve the repudiation of anestablished duty at every step. If the English-an

had not repudiated the duty of absoluteobedience to his king, his political progress wouldhave been impossible. If women had not re-pudiat

the duty of absolute submission to theirhusbands, and defied public opinion as to thelimits set by modesty to their education, theywould never have gained the protection of theMarried Women's Property Act or the powerto qualify themselves as medical practitioners.


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8 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.If Luther had not trampled on his duty to thehead of his Church and on his vow of chastity,our priests would still have to choose betweencelibacy and profligacy. There is nothing new,then, in the defiance of duty by the reformer :every step of progress means a duty repudiated,and a scripture torn up. And every reformer isdenounced accordingly, Luther as an apostate,Cromwell as a traitor, Mary Wollestonecraft asan unwomanly virago, Shelley as a libertine, andIbsen as all the things enumerated in the DailyTelegraph.

This crablike progress of social evolution, inwhich the individual advances by seeming to gobackward, continues to illude us in spite of allthe lessons of history. To the pious man thenewly made freethinker, suddenly renouncingsupernatural revelation, and denying all obliga-ion

to believe the Bible and obey the command-entsas such, appears to be claiming the right

to rob and murder at large. But the freethinkersoon finds reasons for not doing what he doesnot want to do ; and these reasons seem to himto be far more binding on the conscience thanthe precepts of a book of which the divine in-pirati

cannot be rationally proved. The piousman is at last forced to admit " as he was in thecase of the late Charles Bradlaugh, for instance" that the disciples of Voltaire and Tom Paine


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The Tiuo Pioneers. 9

do not pick pockets or cut throats oftener thanyour even Christian : he actually is driven todoubt whether Voltaire himself really screamedand saw the devil on his deathbed.

This experience by no means saves the ration-list* from falling into the same conservatism

when the time comes for his own belief tobe questioned. No sooner has he triumphedover the theologian than he forthwith sets up asbinding on all men the duty of acting logicallywith the objectof securing the greatest good ofthe greatest number, with the result that he ispresently landed in vivisection, ContagiousDiseases Acts, dynamite conspiracies, and othergrotesque but strictly reasonable abominations.Reason becomes Dagon, Moloch, and Jehovahrolled into one. Its devotees exult in havingfreed themselves from the old slavery to a col-ection

of books written by Jewish men of letters.To worship such books was, they can prove,manifestly as absurd as to worship sonatas com-posed

by German musicians, as was done bythe hero of Wagner's novelette, who sat up onhis deathbed to say his creed, beginning, " Ibelieve in God, Mozart, and Beethoven." TheVoltairian freethinker despises such a piece of

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


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lO TJie Quintessence of Ibsenism.

sentiment ; but is it not much more sensible toworship a sonata constructed by a musician thanto worship a syllogism constructed by a logician,since the sonata may at least inspire feelings ofawe and devotion ? This does not occur to thevotary of reason ; and rationalist " free-think-ng"

soon comes to mean syllogism worshipwith rites of human sacrifice ; for just as therationalist's pious predecessor thought that theman who scoffed at the Bible must infalliblyyield without resistance to all his criminal pro-ensitie

so the rationalist in turn becomesconvinced that when a man once loses his faithin Mr Herbert Spencer's Data of Ethics, he isno longer to be trusted to keep his hands offhis neighbour's person, purse, or wife.

In process of time the age of reason had to goits way after the age of faith. In actual expe-ience,

the first shock to rationalism came fromthe observation that though nothing could per-uade

women to adopt it, their inaptitude forreasoning no more prevented them from arrivingat right conclusions than the masculine aptitudefor it saved men from arriving at wrong ones.When this generalization had to be modified inview of the fact that some women did at lastbegin to try their skill at ratiocination, reason wasnot re-established on the throne ; because theresult of Woman's reasoning was that she began


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Tlie Tivo Pioneers. ii

to fall into all the errors which men are justlearn-ngto mistrust.

From the moment she set aboutdoing things for reasons instead of merely find-ng

reasons for what she wanted to do, there wasno saying what mischief she would be at next ;since there are just as good reasons for burninga heretic at the stake as for rescuing a ship-recked

crew from drowning " in fact, thereare better. One of the first and most famousutterances of rationalism would have condemnedit without further hearing had its full signifi-ance

been seen at the time. Voltaire, takingexception to the trash of some poetaster, wasmet with the plea " One must live." " I dontsee the necessity," replied Voltaire. The evasionwas worthy of the Father of Lies himself ; forVoltaire was face to face with the very neces-sity

he was denying " must have known, con-sciouslyor not, that it was the universal postulate

" would have understood, if he had lived to-ay,that since all human institutions are con-structed

to fulfil man's will, and that his willis to live even when his reason teaches him todie, logical necessity, which was the sort Voltairemeant (the other sort being visible enough)can never be a motor in human action, and is,in short, not necessity at all. But that wasnot brought to light in Voltaire's time ; andhe died impenitent, bequeathing to his disciples


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1 2 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.that most logical of agents, the guillotine, whichalso "did not see the necessity." In our owncentury the recognition of the will as distinctfrom the reasoning machinery began to spread.Schopenhauer was the first among the moderns *to appreciate the enormous practical importanceof the distinction, and to make it clear toamateur metaphysicians by concrete instances.Out of his teaching came the formulation of thedilemma that Voltaire shut his eyes to. Here itis. Rationally considered, life is only worthliving when its pleasures are greater than its

"^ I say the moderns, because the will is our oldfriend the soul or spirit of man ; and the doctrine of jus-ifica

not by works, but by faith, clearly derives itsvalidity from the consideration that no action, takenapart from the will behind it, has any moral character :for example, the acts which make the murderer andincendiary infamous are exactly similar to those whichmake the patriotic hero famous. " Original sin " is thewill doing mischief. "Divine grace" is the will doinggood. Our fathers, unversed in the Hegelian dialectic,could not conceive that these two, each the negation ofthe other, were the same. Schopenhauer's philosophy,like that of all pessimists, is really based on the oldview of the will as original sin, and on the 1750-1850view that the intellect is the divine grace that is to saveus from it. It is as well to warn those who fancy thatSchopenhaucrism is one and indivisible, that acceptanceof its metaphysics by no means involves endorsement ofits philosophy.


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The Two Pioneers. 13

pains. Now to a generation which has ceased tobelieve in heaven, and has not yet learned thatthe degradation by poverty of four out of everyfive of its number is artificial and remediable, thefact that life is not worth living is obvious. It isuseless to pretend that the pessimism of Kohe-leth, Shakspere, Dryden, and Swift can be refutedif the world progresses solely by the destructionof the unfit, and yet can only maintain its civi-ization

by manufacturing the unfit in swarms ofwhich that appalling proportion of four to onerepresents but the comparatively fit surviv^ors.Plainly then, the reasonable thing for the ration-lists

to do is to refuse to live. But as none ofthem will commit suicide in obedience to thisdemonstration of " the necessity " for it,there isan end of the notion that we live for reasonsinstead of in fulfilment of our will to live. Thuswe are landed afresh in mystery ; for positivescience gives no account whatever of this will tolive. Indeed the utmost light that positive sciencethrows is but feeble in comparison with theillumination that was looked forward to when itfirst began to dazzle us with its analyses of themachinery of sensation " its researches into thenature of sound and the construction of the ear,the nature of light and the construction of theeye, its measurement of the speed of sensation,its localization of the functions of the brain,


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14 The Qtmitessence of Ibsenism.

and its hints as to the possibility of producing ahomunculus presently as the fruit of its chemicalinvestigation of protoplasm. The fact remainsthat when Darwin, Haeckel, Helmholtz, Young,and the rest, popularized here among the middleclass by Tyndall and Huxley, and among theproletariat by the lectures of the National Secu-ar

Society, have taught you all they know, youare still as utterly at a loss to explain the factof consciousness as you would have been in thedays when you were satisfied with Chambers'Vestiges of Creation. Materialism, in short, onlyisolated the great mystery of consciousness byclearing away several petty mysteries with whichwe had confused it;justas rationalism isolated thegreat mystery of the will to live. The isolationmade both more conspicuous than before. Wethought we had escaped for ever from thecloudy region of metaphysics ; and we were onlycarried further into the heart of them.*

"^ The correlation between rationalism and materialismin this process has some immediate practical import-nce.

Those who give up materialism whilst clinging torationalism generally either relapse into abject submis-ion

to the most paternal of the Churches, or are caughtby the attempts, constantly renewed, of mystics to founda new faith by rationalizing on the hollowness of mate-rialism.

The hollowness has nothing in it ; and if youhave come to grief as a materialist by reasoning aboutsomething, you are not likely, as a mystic, to improvematters by reasoning about nothing.


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The Two Pioneers. 15We have not yet worn off the strangeness of

the positionto

which wehave now been led.

Only the other day our highest boast was thatwe were reasonable human beings. To-day welaugh at that conceit, and see ourselves as wilfulcreatures. Ability to reason accurately is asdesirable as ever, since it is only by accuratereasoning that we can calculate our actions soas to do what we intend to do " that is, to fulfilour will ; but faith in reason as a prime motor isno longer the criterion of the sound mind, anymore than faith in the Bible is the criterion ofrighteous intention.

At this point, accordingly, the illusion as tothe retrogressive movement of progress recursas strongly as ever. Just as the beneficent stepfrom theology to rationalism seems to thetheologist a growth of impiety, does the stepfrom rationalism to the recognition of the willas the prime motor strike the rationalist as alapse of common sanity, so that to both theolo-ist

and rationalist progress at last appearsalarming, threatening, hideous, because it seemsto tend towards chaos. The deists Voltaire andTom Paine were, to the divines of their day,predestined devils, tempting mankind hellward.To deists and divines alike Ferdinand Lassalle,the godless self-worshipper and man-worshipperwould have been a monster. Yet many who to-


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1 6 The Qiimtessence of Ibsenisin.day echo Lassalle's demand that economic andpolitical

institutionsshould

beadapted to thepoor man's will to eat and drink his fillout of

the product of his own labour, are revolted byIbsen's acceptance of the impulse towards greaterfreedom as sufficient ground for the repudiationof any customary duty, however sacred, thatconflicts with it. Society " were it even as freeas Lassalle's Social-Democratic republic " rmisiyit seems to them, go to pieces when conduct isno longer regulated by inviolable covenants.

For what, during all these overthrowings ofthings sacred and things infallible, has beenhappening to that pre-eminently sanctifiedthing, Duty? Evidently it cannot have comeoff scatheless. First there was man's duty toGod, with the priest as assessor. That wasrepudiated ; and then came Man's duty to hisneighbour, with Society as the assessor. Willthis too be repudiated, and be succeeded byMan's duty to himself, assessed by himself?And if so, what will be the effect on the con-ception

of Duty in the abstract ? Let us see.I have just called Lassalle a self-worshipper.

In doing so I cast no reproach on him ; forthis is the last step in the evolution of theconception of duty. Duty arises at first, agloomy tyranny, out of man's helplessness, hisself-mistrust, in a word, his abstract fear. He


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The Tzvo Pioneers. \y

personifies all that he abstractly fears as God,and straightway becomes the slave of his dutyto God. He imposes that slavery fiercely onhis children, threatening them with hell, andpunishing them for their attempts to be happy.When, becoming bolder, he ceases to fear every-hing,

and dares to love something, this duty ofhis to what he fears evolves into a sense of dutyto what he loves. Sometimes he again personi-ies

what he loves as God; and the God of Wrathbecomes the God of Love : sometimes he at oncebecomes a humanitarian, an altruist, acknowledg-ng

only his duty to his neighbour. This stage iscorrelative to the rationalist stage in the evolu-ion

of philosophy and the capitalist phase in theevolution of industry. But in it the emancipatedslave of God falls under the dominion of Society,which, having justreached a phase in which allthe love is ground out of it by the competitivestruggle for money, remorselessly crushes himuntil, in due course of the further growth of hisspirit or will, a sense at last arises in him of hisduty to himself. And when this sense is fullygrown, which it hardly is yet, the tyranny of dutyis broken ; for now the man's God is himself ;and he, self-satisfied at last, ceases to be selfish.The evangelist of this last step must thereforepreach the repudiation of duty. This, to the un-prepare

of his generation, is indeed the wantonB


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1 8 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

masterpiece of paradox. What ! after all thathas been said by men of noble life as to thesecret of all right conduct being only " Duty,duty, duty," is he to be told now that duty isthe primal curse from which we must redeemourselves before we can advance another stepon the road along which, as we imagine " havingforgotten the repudiations made by our fathers" duty and duty alone has brought us thusfar? But why not? God was once the mostsacred of our conceptions ; and he had to bedenied. Then Reason became the InfalliblePope, only to be deposed in turn. Is Dutymore sacred than God or Reason ?

Having now arrived at the prospect of therepudiation of duty by Man, I shall make adigression on the subjectof ideals and idealists,as treated by Ibsen. I shall go round in a loop,and come back to the same point by way of therepudiation of duty by Woman ; and then at lastI shall be in a position to describe the playswithout risk of misunderstanding.


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w

II.

IDEALS AND IDEALISTS.

E have seen that as Man grows through theages, he finds himself bolder by the growthof his spirit (ifI may so name the un-knownand dares more and more to love and

trust insteadof

to fearand

fight. But his couragehas other effects : he also raises himself frommere consciousness to knowledge by daring moreand more to face facts and tell himself thetruth. For in his infancy of helplessness andterror he could not face the inexorable ; andfacts being of all things the most inexorable, hemasked all the threatening ones as fast as hediscovered them ; so that now every mask re-quires

a hero to tear it off. The king of terrors,Death, was the Arch-Inexorable : Man couldnot bear the dread of that thought. He mustpersuade himself that Death could be propi-iated,

circumvented, abolished. How he fixedthe mask of immortality on the face of Death forthis purpose we all know. And he did the likewith all disagreeables as long as they remainedinevitable. Otherwise he must have gone mad


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20 TJie Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

with terror of the grim shapes around him,headed by the skeleton with the scythe andhourglass. The masks were his ideals, as hecalled them ; and what, he would ask, wouldlife be without ideals? Thus he became anidealist, and remained so until he dared tobegin pulling the masks off and looking thespectres in the face " dared, that is, to be moreand more a realist. But all men are not equallybrave ; and the greatest terror prevailed when-ver

some realist bolder than the rest laid handson a mask which they did not yet dare to dowithout.

We have plenty of these masks around usstill some of them more fantastic than anyof the Sandwich islanders' masks in the BritishMuseum. In our novels and romances especiallywe see the most beautiful of all the masks "those devised to disguise the brutalities of thesexual instinct in the earlier stages of its de-elopme

and to soften the rigorous aspect ofthe iron laws by which Society regulates itsgratification. When the social organism be-omes

bent on civilization, it has to force mar-riageand family life on the individual, because

it can perpetuate itself in no other way whilstlove is still known only by fitful glimpses, thebasis of sexual relationship being in the mainmere physical appetite. Under these circum-


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Ideals and Idealists. 21

stances men try to graft pleasure on necessityby desperately pretending that the institutionforced upon them is a congenial one, makingit a point of public decency to assume alwaysthat men spontaneously love their kindred betterthan their chance acquaintances, and that thewoman once desired is always desired : also thatthe family is woman's proper sphere, and thatno really womanly woman ever forms an attach-ent,

or even knows what it means, until sheis requested to do so by a man. Now ifanyone's childhood has been embittered by thedislike of his mother and the ill-temper of hisfather ; if his wife has ceased to care for himand he is heartily tired of his wife ; if his brotheris going to law with him over the divisionof the family property, and his son acting instudied defiance of his plans and wishes, it ishard for him to persuade himself that passionis eternal and that blood is thicker than water.Yet if he tells himself the truth, all his life seemsa waste and a failure by the light of it. It comesthen to this, that his neighbours must eitheragree with him that the whole system is a mis-ake,

and discard it for a new one, which cannotpossibly happen until social organization so faroutgrows the institution that Society can per-etuate

itself without it ; or else they must keephim in countenance by resolutely making believe


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22 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.that all the illusions with which it has beenmasked are realities.

For the sake of precision, let us imagine acommunity of a thousand persons, organizedfor the perpetuation of the species on the basisof the British family as we know it at present.Seven hundred of them, we will suppose, find theBritish family arrangement quite good enoughfor them. Two hundred and ninety-nine find ita failure, but must put up with it since they arein a minority. The remaining person occupiesa position to be explained presently. The 299failures will not have the courage to face thefact that they are failures " irremediable failures,since they cannot prevent the 700 satisfied onesfrom coercing them into conformity with themarriage law. They will accordingly try topersuade themselves that, whatever their ownparticular domestic arrangements may be, thefamily is a beautiful and holy natural institu-ion.

For the fox not only declares that thegrapes he cannot get are sour : he also insists thatthe sloes he can get are sweet. Now observe whathas happened. The family as it really is is aconventional arrangement, legally enforced, whichthe majority,because it happens to suit them,think good enough for the minority, whom ithappens not to suit at all. The family as a beau-iful

and holy natural institution is only a fancy


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picture of what every family would have to be ifeverybody was to be suited, invented by theminority as a mask for the reality, which in itsnakedness is intolerable to them. We call thissort of fancy picture an IDEAL ; and the policyof forcing individuals to act on the assumptionthat all ideals are real, and to recognize andaccept such action as standard moral conduct,absolutely valid under all circumstances, con-trary

conduct or any advocacy of it being dis-ountenaand punished as immoral, may

therefore be described as the policy of IDEALISM.Our 299 domestic failures are therefore becomeidealists as to marriage ; and in proclaiming theideal in fiction, poetry, pulpit and platformoratory, and serious private conversation, theywill far outdo the 700 who comfortably acceptmarriage as a matter of course, never dreamingof calling it an " institution," much less a holyand beautiful one, and being pretty plainly ofopinion that idealism is a crackbrained fuss aboutnothing. The idealists, hurt by this, will retortby calling them Philistines. VVe then have oursociety classified as 700 Philistines and 299idealists, leaving one man unclassified. He is theman who is strong enough to face the truth thatthe idealists are shirking. He says flatly ofmarriage, " This thing is a failure for many of us.It is insufferable that two human beings, having


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24 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

entered into relations which only warm affectioncan render tolerable, should be forced to main-ain

them after such affections have ceased toexist, or in spite of the fact that they have neverarisen. The alleged natural attractions andrepulsions upon which the family ideal is baseddo not exist ; and it is historically false that thefamily was founded for the purpose of satisfyingthem. Let us provide otherwise for the socialends which the family subserves, and then abol-sh

its compulsory character altogether." Whatwill be the attitude of the rest to this outspokenman ? The Philistines will simply think himmad. But the idealists will be terrified beyondmeasure at the proclamation of their hiddenthought " at the presence of the traitor amongthe conspirators of silence " at the rending of thebeautiful veil they and their poets have woven tohide the unbearable face of the truth. They willcrucify him, burn him, violate their own ideals offamily affection by taking his children away fromhim, ostracize him, brand him as immoral, pro-ligate,

filthy, and appeal against him to thedespised Philistines, specially idealized for theoccasion as SOCIETY. How far they will proceedagainst him depends on how far his courage ex-ceeds

theirs. At his worst, they call him cynicand paradoxer : at his best they do their utmostto ruin him ifnot to take his life. Thus, purblindly


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courageous moralists like Mandeville and La-rochefoucauld, who merely state unpleasant factswithout denying the validity of current ideals,and who indeed depend on those ideals to maketheir statements piquant, get off with nothingworse than this name of cynic, the free use ofwhich is a familiar mark of the zealous idealist.But take the case of the man who has alreadyserved us as an example " Shelley. The idealistsdid not call Shelley a cynic : they called him afiend until they invented a new illusion to enablethem to enjoy the beauty of his lyrics " saidillusion being nothing less than the pretencethat since he was at bottom an idealist him-elf,

his ideals must be identical with those ofTennyson and Longfellow, neither of whom everwrote a line in which some highly respectableideal was not implicit.*

* The following are examples of the two stages ofShelley criticism :

" We feel as if one of the darkest of the fiends hadbeen clothed with a human body to enable him to gratifyhis

enmity against thehuman race, and as if the super-atural

atrocity of his hate were only heightened by hispower to do injury. So strongly has this impressiondwelt upon our minds that we absolutely asked a friend,who had seen this individual, to describe him to us " as ifa cloven hoof, or horn, or flames from the mouth, musthave marked the external appearance of so bitter anenemy of mankind." {Literary Gazette^ 19th May 182 1.)

" A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void


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26 The Quintessenceof Ibsenisin.Here the admission that Shelley, the realist,

was an idealist too, seems to spoil the wholeargument. And it certainly spoils its verbalconsistency. For we unfortunately use this wordideal indifferently to denote both the institu-ion

which the ideal masks and the mask it-elf,thereby producing desperate confusion of

thought, since the institution may be an effeteand poisonous one, whilst the mask may be,and indeed generally is, an image of what wewould fain have in its place. If the existingfacts, with their masks on, are to be calledideals, and the future possibilities which themasks depict are also to be called ideals " if,again, the man who is defending existing insti-utions

by maintaining their identity with theirmasks is to be confounded under one name withthe man who is striving to realize the futurepossibilities by tearing the mask and the thingmasked asunder, then the position cannot beintelligibly described by mortal pen : you and I,reader, will be at cross purposes at every sentence

his luminous wings in vain." (Matthew Arnold, inhis preface to the selection of poems by Byron, dated1881.)

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


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unless you allow me to distinguish pioneers likeShelley and Ibsen as realists from the idealists ofmy imaginary community of one thousand. Ifyou ask why I have not allotted the terms theother way, and called Shelley and Ibsen idealistsand the conventionalists realists, I reply that Ibsenhimself, though he has not formally made thedistinction, has so repeatedly harped on conven-tions

and conventionalists as ideals and idealiststhat if I were now perversely to call themrealities and realists, I should confuse readers ofThe Wild Duck and RosDiershobn more than Ishould help them. Doubtless I shall be re-proach

for puzzling people by thus limitingthe meaning of the term ideal. But what, Iask, is that inevitable passing perplexity com-pared

to the inextricable tangle I must produceif I follow the custom, and use the word indis-riminatel

in its two violently incompatiblesenses ? If the term realist is objected to onaccount of some of its modern associations, I canonly recommend you, if you must associate itwith something else than my own description ofits meaning (I do not deal in definitions),oassociate it, not with Zola and Maupassant, butwith Plato.

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


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28 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.just provided is as nothing beside that whichcomes of any attempt to express the relations ofthese three sections, simple as they are, in termsof the ordinary systems of reason and duty.The ideaHst, higher in the ascent of evolution thanthe Philistine, yet hates the highest and strikesat him with a dread and rancour of which theeasy-going Philistine is guiltless. The man whohas risen above the danger and the fear that hisacquisitiveness will lead him to theft, his temperto murder, and his affections to debauchery :this is he who is denounced as an arch-scoundreland libertine, and thus confounded with thelowest because he is the highest. And it is notthe ignorant and stupid who maintain this error,but the literate and the cultured. When thetrue prophet speaks, he is proved to be bothrascal and idiot, not by those who have neverread of how foolishly such learned demonstra-ions

have come off in the past, but by those whohave themselves written volumes on the cruci-ixions,

the burnings, the stonings, the headingsand hangings, the Siberia transportations, thecalumny and ostracism which have been the lotof the pioneer as well as of the camp follower.It is from men of established literary reputationthat we learn that William Blake was mad, thatShelley was spoiled by living in a low set, thatRobert Owen was a man who did not know the


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world, that Ruskin is incapable of comprehendingpoHtical economy, that Zola is a mere blackguard,and that Ibsen is " a Zola with a wooden leg."The great musician, accepted by the unskilledlistener, is vilified by his fellow-musicians : it wasthe musical culture of Europe that pronouncedWagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyer-eer.

The great artist finds his foes among thepainters, and not among the men in the street :it is the Royal Academy which places MrMarcus Stone " not to mention Mr Hodgson "above Mr Burne Jones. It is not rational thatit should be so ; but it is so, for all that. Therealist at last loses patience with ideals altogether,and sees in them only something to blind us,something to numb us, something to murderself in us, something whereby, instead of resist-ng

death, we can disarm it by committingsuicide. The idealist, who has taken refugewith the ideals because he hates himself and isashamed of himself, thinks that all this is somuch the better. The realist, who has come tohave a deep respect for himself and faith in thevalidity of his own will, thinks it so much theworse. To the one, human nature, naturallycorrupt, is only held back from the excesses ofthe last years of the Roman empire by self-denying conformity to the ideals. To the otherthese ideals are only swaddling clothes which


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30 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.man has outgrown, and which insufferably impedehis movements. No wonder the two cannotagree. The idealist says, " Realism meansegotism ; and egotism means depravity." Therealist declares that when a man abnegates thewill to live and be free in a world of the livingand free, seeking only to conform to ideals forthe sake of being, not himself, but " a good man,"then he is morally dead and rotten, and must beleft unheeded to abide his resurrection, if that bygood luck arrive before his bodily death. Un-ortuna

this is the sort of speech that nobodybut a realist understands. It will be moreamusing as well as more convincing to take anactual example of an idealist criticising a realist.


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III.

THE WOMANLY WOMAN.

EVERYBODYremembers the " Diary ofMarie Bashkirtseff." An outline of it, witha running commentary, was given in the

Revieiv ofReviezvs (June 1890) by the editor, MrWiUiam Stead, a sort of modern JuHan the Apos-ate,

who, having gained an immense followingby a public service in rendering which he had toperform a realistic feat of a somewhat scandalouscharacter, entered upon a campaign with the

object of establishing theideal of sexual

" purity " as a condition of public life. As heretains his best qualities " faith in himself, wilful-ess,

conscientious unscrupulousness " he canalways make himself heard. Prominent amonghis ideals is an ideal of womanliness. In supportof that ideal he will, like all idealists, make andbelieve any statement, however obviously andgrotesquely unreal. When he found MarieBashkirtseff's account of herself utterly incom-atible

with the account of a woman's mindgiven to him by his ideal, he was confrontedwith the dilemma that either Marie was not a


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32 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.woman or else his ideal did not correspond tonature. He actually accepted the former alterna-ive.

" Of the distinctively womanly," he says,"there is in her but little trace. She was thevery antithesis of a true woman." Mr Stead'snext difficulty was, that self-control, being aleading quality in his ideal, could not have beenpossessed by Marie : otherwise she would havebeen more like his ideal. Nevertheless he hadto record that she, without any compulsionfrom circumstances, made herself a highly skilledartist by working ten hours a day for six years.Let anyone who thinks that this is no evi-ence

of self-control just try it for six months.Mr Stead's verdict nevertheless, was " No self-control." However, his fundamental quarrelwith Marie came out in the following lines." Marie," he said, " was artist, musician, wit,philosopher, student, anything you like but anatural woman with a heart to love, and a soulto find its supreme satisfaction in sacrifice forlover or for child." Now of all the idealistabominations that make society pestiferous, Idoubt if there be any so mean as that of forcingself-sacrifice on a woman under pretence thatshe likes it ; and, if she ventures to contradictthe pretence, declaring her no true woman. InIndia they carried this piece of idealism to thelength of declaring that a wife could not bear to


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TJie Womanly Woman. 33

survive her husband, but would be prompted byher own faithful, loving, beautiful nature to offerup her life on the pyre which consumed his deadbody. The astonishing thing is that women,sooner than be branded as unsexed wretches,allowed themselves to be stupefied with drink,and in that unwomanly condition burnt alive.British Philistinism put down widow idealizingwith the strong hand ; and suttee is abolished inIndia. The English form of it still survives ;and Mr Stead, the rescuer of the children, isone of its high-priests. Imagine his feelings oncoming across this entry in a woman's diary," I love myself" Or this, " I swear solemnly" by the Gospels, by the passion of Christ, byMYSELF " that in four years I will be famous."The young woman was positively proposing toexercise for her own sake all the powers thatwere given her, in Mr Stead's opinion, solelythat she might sacrifice them for her lover orchild ! No wonder he is driven to exclaimagain, " She was very clever, no doubt ; butwoman she was not." Now observe this notableresult. Marie Bashkirtseff, instead of being aless agreeable person than the ordinary femaleconformer to the ideal of womanliness, wasconspicuously the reverse. Mr Stead himselfwrote as one infatuated with her mere diary,and pleased himself by representing her as a

C


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34 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.

person who fascinated everybody, and was asource of delight to all about

her by the mereexhilaration and hope-giving atmosphere of herwilfulness. The truth is, that in real life a self-sacrificing woman, or, as Mr Stead would put it,a womanly woman, is not only taken advantageof, but disliked as well for her pains. No manpretends that his soul finds its supreme satisfac-ion

in self-sacrifice : such an affectation wouldstamp him as a coward and weakling : themanly man is he who takes the Bashkirtseffview of himself. But men are not the less lovedon this account. No one ever feels helpless bythe side of the self-helper ; whilst the self-sacrificer is always a drag, a responsibility, areproach, an ev-erlasting and unnatural troublewith whom no really strong soul can live. Onlythose who have helped themselves know how tohelp others, and to respect their right to helpthemselves.

Although romantic idealists generally insiston self-surrender as an indispensable element intrue womanly love, its repulsive effect is well-known and feared in practice by both sexes.The extreme instance is the reckless self-aban-onment

seen in the infatuation of passionatesexual desire. Everyone who becomes the objectof that infatuation shrinks from it instinctively.Love loses its charm when it is not free ; and


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The Womanly Woman. 35

whether the compulsion is that of custom andlaw, or of infatuation, the effect is the same : itbecomes valueless. The desire to give inspiresno affection unless there is also the power towithhold ; and the successful wooer, in bothsexes alike, is the one who can stand out forhonourable conditions, and, failing them, go with-ut.

Such conditions are evidently not offeredto either sex by the legal marriage of to-day ;for it is the intense repugnance inspired by thecompulsory character of the legalized conjugalrelation that leads, firstto the idealization of mar-riage

whilst it remains indispensable as a meansof perpetuating society ; then to its modificationby divorce and by the abolition of penalties for re-fusal

to comply with judicialorders for restitutionof conjugal rights; and finally to its disuse anddisappearance as the responsibility for the main-enance

and education of the rising generationis shifted from the parent to the community.*

"* A dissertation on the anomalies and impossibilitiesof the marriage law at its present stage would be toofar out of the main course of my argument to be intro-uced

in the text above ; but it may be well to pointout in passing to those who regard marriage as an in-iolabl

and inviolate institution, that necessity hasalready forced us to tamper with it to such an extent thatat this moment the highest court in the kingdom is face toface with a husband and wife, the one demanding whethera woman may saddle him with all the responsibilities of a


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36 TJie Quintessence of Ibsemsni.Although the growing repugnance to face the

Churchof

England marriage servicehas led

many celebrants to omit those passages whichfrankly explain the objectof the institution, weare not likely to dispense with legal ties andobligations, and trust wholly to the permanenceof love, until the continuity of society no longerdepends on the private nursery. Love, as apractical factor in society, is still a mere appetite.That higher development of it which Ibsenshews us occurring in the case of Rebecca Westin Rosmersholm is only known to most of us bythe descriptions of great poets, who themselves,as their biographies prove, have often known it,not by sustained experience, but only by briefglimpses. And it is never a first-fruit of their

husband and then refuse to live with him, and the otherasking whether the law allows her husband to commitabduction, imprisonment and rape upon her. If the courtsays Yes to the husband, marriage is made intolerable formen ; if it says Yes to the wife, marriage is made in-olerab

for women ; and as this exhausts the possiblealternatives, it is clear that provision must be made forthe dissolution of such marriages if the institution is to bemaintained at all, which it must be until its social functionis otherwise provided for. Marriage is thus, by force ofcircumstances, compelled to buy extension of life byextension of divorce, much as if a fugitive should try todelay a pursuing wolf by throwing portions of his ownheart to it.


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The Womanly Woman. 37love affairs. Tannhauser may die in the con-viction

that one moment of the emotion he feltwith St Elizabeth was fuller and happier thanall the hours of passion he spent with Venus ;but that does not alter the fact that love beganfor him with Venus, and that its earlier tentativestowards the final goal were attended with relapses.Now Tannhiiuser's passion for Venus is a develop-ent

of the humdrum fondness of the bourgeoisJack for his Gill, a development at once higherand more dangerous, just as idealism is at oncehigher and more dangerous than Philistinism.The fondness is the germ of the passion : thepassion is the germ of the more perfect love.When Blake told men that through excess theywould learn moderation, he knew that the wayfor the present lay through the Venusberg, andthat the race would assuredly not perish there assome individuals have, and as the Puritan fearswe all shall unless we find a way round. Alsohe no doubt foresaw the time when our childrenwould be born on the other side of it, and so bespared that fiery purgation.

But the very facts that Blake is still commonlyregarded as a crazy visionary, and that thecurrent criticism of RosmersJiolm entirely failseven to notice the evolution of Rebecca's passionfor Rosmer into her love for him, much moreto credit the moral transfiguration which accom-


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38 The Qimitessenceof Ihsenisifi.

panics it,shew how absurd it would be to pre-end,for the sake of edification, that the ordinary

marriage of to-day is a union between a WilliamBlake and a Rebecca West, or that it would bepossible, even if it were enlightened policy, todeny the satisfaction of the sexual appetite topersons who have not reached that stage. Anoverwhelming majority of such marriages asare not purely de convenance^ are entered intofor the gratification of that appetite either inits crudest form or veiled only by those ideal-stic

illusions which the youthful imaginationweaves so wonderfully under the stimulus ofdesire, and which older people indulgently laughat. This being so, it is not surprising that oursociety, being directly dominated by men, comesto regard Woman, not as an end in herselflike Man, but solely as a means of ministeringto his appetite. The ideal wife is one whodoes everything that the ideal husband likes,and nothing else. Now to treat a person asa means instead of an end is to deny thatperson's right to live. And to be treated as ameans to such an end as sexual intercourse withthose who deny one's right to live is insufferableto any human being. Woman, if she dares facethe fact that she is being so treated, must eitherloathe herself or else rebel. As a rule, whencircumstances enable her to rebel successfully "


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TJie Womanly Woman. 39

for instance, when the accident of genius enablesher to "lose her

character" withoutlosing her

employment or cutting herself off from the societyshe values " she does rebel ; but circumstancesseldom do. Docs she then loathe herself? Byno means : she deceives herself in the idealistfashion by denying that the love which her suitoroffers her is tainted with sexual appetite at all.It is, she declares, a beautiful, disinterested, pure,sublime devotion to another by which a man'slife is exalted and purified, and a woman'srendered blest. And of all the cynics, thefilthiest to her mind is the one who sees, in theman making honourable proposals to his futurewife, nothing but the human male seeking hisfemale. The man himself keeps her confirmedin her illusion ; for the truth is unbearable tohim too : he wants to form an affectionate tie,and not to drive a degrading bargain. After all,the germ of the highest love is in them both,though as yet itis no more than the appetite theyare disguising so carefully from themselves. Con-equently

every stockbroker who has justbroughthis business up to marrying point woos in termsof the romantic illusion ; and it is agreed betweenthe two that their marriage shall realize theromantic ideal. Then comes the breakdown ofthe plan. The young wife finds that her husbandis neglecting her for his business ; that his


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40 The Quintessence of Ibsenisvi.interests, his activities, his whole life except thatone part of it to which only a cynic ever referredbefore her marriage, lies away from home ; andthat her business is to sit there and mope untilshe is wanted. Then what can she do? If shecomplains, he, the self-helper, can do withouther ; whilst she is dependent on him for herposition, her livelihood, her place in society, herhome, her name, her very bread. All this isbrought home to her by the first burst of dis-leasur

her complaints provoke. Fortunately,things do not remain for ever at this point "perhaps the most wretched in a woman's life.The self-respect she has lost as a wife she regainsas a mother, in which capacity her use and im-ortanc

to the community compare favourablywith those of most men of business. She iswanted in the house, wanted in the market,wanted by the children ; and now, instead ofweeping because her husband is away in thecity, thinking of stocks and shares instead ofhis ideal woman, she would regard his presencein the house all day as an intolerable nuisance.And so, though she is completely disillusionedon the subjectof ideal love, yet, since it has notturned out so badly after all, she countenancesthe illusion still from the point of view that it isa useful and harmless means of getting boys andgirls to marry and settle down. And this con-


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viction is the stronger in her because she feelsthat if she had known as much about marriagethe day before her wedding as she did six monthsafter, it would have been extremely hard to induceher to get married at all.

This prosaic solution is satisfactory only withincertain limits. It depends altogether upon theaccident of the woman having some naturalvocation for domestic management and the careof children, as well as on the husband beingfairly good-natured and livable-with. Hencearises the idealist illusion that a vocation fordomestic management and the care of childrenis natural to women, and that women wholack them are not women at all, but mem-bers

of the third, or Bashkirtseff sex. Evenif this were true, it is obvious that if theBashkirtseffs are to be allowed to live, they havea right to suitable institutions just as muchas men and women. But it is not true.The domestic career is no more natural to allwomen than the military career is natural toall men ; although it may be necessary thatevery able - bodied woman should be calledon to risk her life in childbed just as itmay be necessary that every man should becalled on to risk his life in the battlefield.It is of course quite true that the majority ofwomen are kind to children and prefer their


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42 The Quintessence of Ibsemsmown to other people's. But exactly the samething is true of the majority of men, who never-thelessdo not consider that their proper sphereis the nursery. The case may be illustrated moregrotesquely by the fact that the majority ofwomen who have dogs, are kind to them, andprefer their own dogs to other people's ; yet it isnot proposed that women should restrict theiractivities to the rearing of puppies. If we havecome to think that the nursery and the kitchenare the natural sphere of a woman, we havedone so exactly as English children come tothink that a cage is the natural sphere of aparrot " because they have never seen one any-here

else. No doubt there are Philistine parrotswho agree with their owners that it is better tobe in a cage than out, so long as there is plentyof hempseed and Indian corn there. Theremay even be idealist parrots who persuade them-elves

that the mission of a parrot is to ministerto the happiness of a private family by whistlingand saying " Pretty Polly," and that it is in thesacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuitthat a true parrot finds the supreme satisfactionof its soul. I will not go so far as to affirmthat there are theological parrots who are con-vinced

that imprisonment is the will of Godbecause it is unpleasant ; but I am confidentthat there are rationalist parrots who can demon-


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strate that it would be a cruel kindness to let aparrot out to fall a prey to cats, or at least toforget its accomplishments and coarsen its natu-ally

delicate fibres in an unprotected strugglefor existence. Still, the only parrot a free-souled person can sympathize with is the onethat insists on being let out as the firstconditionof its making itself agreeable. A selfish bird,you may say : one that puts its own gratificationbefore that of the family which is so fond of it" before even the greatest happiness of thegreatest number : one that, in aping the inde-endent

spirit of a man, has unparroted itselfand become a creature that has neither the home-loving nature of a bird nor the strength andenterprise of a mastiff. All the same, yourespect that parrot in spite of your conclusivereasoning ; and if it persists, you will have eitherto let it out or kill it.

The sum of the matter is that unless Womanrepudiates her womanliness, her duty to her hus-and,

to her children, to society, to the law, andto everyone but herself, she cannot emancipateherself. But her duty to herself is no duty atall, since a debt is cancelled when the debtorand creditor are the same person. Its paymentis simply a fulfilment of the individual will, uponwhich all duty is a restriction, founded on theconception of the will as naturally malign and


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44 The Quintessence of Ibsenisvi.devilish. Therefore Woman has to repudiateduty altogether. In that repudiation lies herfreedom ; for it is false to say that Woman isnow directly the slave of Man : she is the im-ediate

slave of duty ; and as man's path tofreedom is strewn with the wreckage of theduties and ideals he has trampled on, so musthers be. She may indeed mask her iconoclasmby proving in rationalist fashion, as Man hasoften done for the sake of a quiet life, that allthese discarded idealist conceptions will be for-ified

instead of shattered by her emancipation.To a person with a turn for logic, such proofsare as easy as playing the piano is to Paderewski.But it will not be true. A whole basketful ofideals of the most sacred quality will be smashedby the achievement of equality for women andmen. Those who shrink from such a clatter andbreakage may comfort themselves with the re-flecti

that the replacement of the broken goodswill be prompt and certain. It is always a caseof " The ideal is dead : long live the ideal !" Andthe advantage of the work of destruction is, thatevery new ideal is less of an illusion than theone it has supplanted ; so that the destroyer ofideals, though denounced as an enemy of society,is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies.

My digression is now over. Having traversed


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The Womanly Wonian. 45

my loop as I promised, and come back to Man's

repudiation of duty by way of Woman's, I mayat last proceed to give some more particularaccount of Ibsen's work without further pre-ccupati

with Mr Clement Scott's protest, orthe many others of which it is the type. Forwe now see that the pioneer must necessarilyprovoke such outcry as he repudiates duties,tramples on ideals, profanes what was sacred,sanctifies what was infamous, always driving hisplough through gardens of pretty weeds in spiteof the laws made against trespassers

for theprotection of the worms which feed on the roots,letting in light and air to hasten the putrefactionof decaying matter, and everywhere proclaimingthat " the old beauty is no longer beautiful, thenew truth no longer true." He can do no less ;and what more and what else he does it is notgiven to all of his generation to understand.And if any man does not understand, and cannotforesee the harvest, what can he do but cry outin all sincerity against such destruction, until atlast we come to know the cry of the blind likeany other street cry, and to bear with it as anhonest cry, albeit a false alarm.


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IV.

THE PLAYS.

BRAND.

WE are now prepared to learn without mis-ivingthat a typical Ibsen play is onein which the "leading lady" is an un-womanly

woman, and the " villain " an idealist.It follows that the leading lady is not a heroineof the Drury Lane type ; nor does the villainforge or assassinate, since he is a villain byvirtue of his determination to do nothing wrong.Therefore readers of Ibsen " not playgoers " havesometimes so far misconceived him as to supposethat his villains are examples rather than warn-ings,

and that the mischief and ruin which attendtheir actions are but the tribulations from whichthe soul comes out purified as gold from thefurnace. In fact, the beginning of Ibsen's Euro-ean

reputation was the edification with whichthe pious of Scandinavia received his great dra-atic

poem Brand. Brand the priest is an idealistof heroic earnestness, strength, and courage. He


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Brand. 47

declares himself the champion, not of things asthey are, nor of things

as they can be made, butof things as they ought to be. Things as theyought to be mean for him things as orderedby men conformed to his ideal of the perfectAdam, who, again, is not man as he is or can be,but man conformed to all the ideals " man as itis his duty to be. In insisting on this conformity,Brand spares neither himself nor anyone else.Life is nothing : self is nothing : the perfectAdam is everything. The imperfect Adam doesnot fall in with these views. A peasant whomhe urges to cross a glacier in a fog because it ishis duty to visit his dying daughter, not onlyflatly declines, but endeavours forcibly to preventBrand from risking his own life. Brand knockshim clown, and sermonizes him with fierce earnest-ess

and scorn. Presently Brand has to cross afiord in a storm to reach a dying man who,having committed a series of murders, wants" consolation " from a priest. Brand cannot goalone : someone must hold the rudder of his boatwhilst he manages the sail. The fisher folk, inwhom the old Adam is strong, do not adopt hisestimate of the gravity of the situation, and re-fuse

to go. A woman, fascinated by his heroismand idealism, goes. That ends in their marriage,and in the birth of a child to which they becomedeeply attached. Then Brand aspiring from


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48 The Quintessenceof Ibsenism.height to height of devotion to his ideal, plungesfrom depth to depth of murderous cruelty. Firstthe child must die from the severity of the climatebecause Brand must not flinch from the post ofduty and leave his congregation exposed to theperil of getting an inferior preacher in his place.Then he forces his

wifeto give the clothes of the

dead child to a gipsy whose baby needs them.The bereaved mother does not grudge the gift ;but she wants to hold back only one little gar-ent

as a relic of her darling. But Brand seesin this reservation the imperfection of the im-erfect

Eve. He forces her to regard the situa-ionas a choice between the relic and his ideal.

She sacrifices the relic to the ideal, and then dies,broken-hearted. Having killed her, and therebyplaced himself beyond ever daring to doubt theidealism upon whose altar he has immolated her" having also refused to go to his mother's death-ed

because she compromises with his principlesin disposing of her property, he is hailed by thepeople as a saint, and finds his newly builtchurch too small for his congregation. So he callsupon them to follow him to worship God in Hisown temple, the mountains. After a brief prac-ical

experience of this arrangement, they changetheir minds, and stone him. The very mountainsthemselves stone him, indeed ; for he is killed byan avalanche.


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Peer Gynt. 49

PEER GYNT.

Brand dies a saint, having caused more in-ensesuffering by his saintliness than the most

talented sinner could possibly have done withtwice his opportunities. Ibsen does not leavethis to be inferred. In another dramatic poemhe gives us an accomplished rascal named PeerGynt, an idealist who avoids Brand's errors bysetting up as his ideal the realization of him-elf

by the utter satisfaction of his own will.In this he would seem to be on the path towhich Ibsen himself points ; and indeed allwho know the two plays will agree that whetheror no it was better to be Peer Gynt than Brand,it was beyond all question better to be themother or the sweetheart of Peer, scapegraceand liar as he was, than mother or wife to thesaintly Brand. Brand would force his ideal onall men and women : Peer Gynt keeps his idealfor himself alone : it is indeed implicit in theideal itself that it should be unique " that healone should have the force to realize it. ForPeer's first boyish notion of the self-realizedman is not the saint, but the demigod whose in-omita

will is stronger than destiny, thefighter, the master, the man whom no womancan resist, the mighty hunter, the knight of athousand adventures, " the model, in short, of

D


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50 The Quintessence of Ihsenisnt.the lover in a lady's novel, or the hero in aboy's romance. Now, no such person exists,or ever did exist, or ever can exist. The manwho cultivates an indomitable will and refuses tomake way for anything or anybody, soon findsthat he cannot hold a street crossing against atram car, much less a world against the wholehuman race. Only by plunging into illusions towhich every fact gives the lie can he persuadehimself that his will is a force that can overcomeall other forces, or that it is less conditioned bycircumstances than is a wheelbarrow. However,Peer Gynt, being imaginative enough to conceivehis ideal, is also imaginative enough to findillusions to hide its unreality, and to persuadehimself that Peer Gynt, the shabby countrysideloafer, is Peer Gynt, Emperor of Himself, as hewrites over the door of his hut in the mountains.His hunting feats are invented ; his militarygenius has no solider foundation than a streetfight with a smith ;and his reputation as an adven-urous

daredevil he has to gain by th" bravadoof carrying off the bride from a wedding at whichthe guests snub him. Only in the mountainscan he enjoy his illusions undisturbed by ridicule :yet even in the mountains he finds obstacleswhich he cannot force his way through, obstacleswhich withstand him as spirits with voices, tell-ng

him that he must go round. But he will


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Peer Gynt. 51

not : he will go forward : he will cut his pathsword in hand, in spite of fate. All the same,he has to go round ; for the world-will iswithout Peer Gynt as well as within him.Then he tries the supernatural, only to find thatit means nothing more than the transmogrifyingof squalid realities by lies and pretences. Still,like our amateurs of thaumaturgy, he is willingto enter into a conspiracy of make-believe up toa certain point. When the Trold king's daughterappears as a repulsive ragged creature riding ona pig, he is ready to accept her as a beautifulprincess on a noble steed, on condition that sheaccepts his mother's tumble-down farmhouse,with the broken window panes stopped up withold clouts, as a splendid castle. He will go withher among the Trolds, and pretend that the grue-ome

ravine in which they hold their orgies is aglorious palace ; he will partake of their filthyfood and declare it nectar and ambrosia ; he willapplaud their obscene antics as exquisite dancing,and their discordant din as divine music ; butwhen they finally propose to slit his eyes so thathe may see and hear these things, not as theyare, but as he has been pretending to see andhear them, he draws back, resolved to be himselfeven in self-deception. He leaves the moun-tains

and becomes a prosperous man of businessin America, highly respectable and ready for


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52 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

any profitable speculation " slave trade, Bibletrade, whisky trade, missionary trade, anything !In this phase he takes to piety, and persuadeshimself, like Mr Stanley, that he is under thespecial care of God. This opinion is shaken byan adventure in which he is marooned on theAfrican coast ; and it is not restored until thetreacherous friends who marooned him are de-troyed

before his eyes by the blowing-up of thesteam yacht they have just stolen from him,when he utters his celebrated exclamation, " Ah,God is a Father to me after all ; but economicalhe certainly is not." He finds a white horsein the desert, and is accepted on its account asthe Messiah by an Arab tribe, a success whichmoves him to declare that now at last he isreally worshipped for himself, whereas in Ame-ica

people only respected his breast-pin, thesymbol of his money. In commerce, too, hereflects, his eminence was a mere matter ofchance, whilst as a prophet he is eminent bypure natural fitness for the post. This is endedby his falling in love with a dancing-girl, who,after leading him into every sort of undignifiedand ludicrous extravagance, ranging from hishailing her as the Eternal-Feminine of Goethe tothe more practical folly of giving her his whitehorse and all his prophetic finery, runs away withthe spoil, and leaves him once more helpless and


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Peer Gynt. 53

alone in the desert. He wanders until he comesto the great Sphinx, beside which he finds aGerman gentleman in great perplexity as to whothe Sphinx is. Peer Gynt, seeing in that im-assive

immovable, majesticfigure, a symbol ofhis own ideal, is able to tell the German gentle-an

at once that the Sphinx is itself. Thisexplanation dazzles the German, who, after somefurther discussion of the philosophy of self-realization, invites Peer Gynt to accompany himto a club of learned men in Cairo, who are ripefor enlightenment on this very question. Peer,delighted, accompanies the German to the club,which turns out to be a madhouse in which thelunatics have broken loose and locked up theirkeepers. It is in this madhouse, and by thesemadmen, that Peer Gynt is at last crownedEmperor of Himself He receives their homageas he lies in the dust fainting with terror.

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


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54 The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.drowning man from the spar he is cHnging to ina shipwreck lest it should not suffice to supporttwo. At last he finds a deserted sweetheart ofhis youth still waiting for him and still believingin him. In the imagination of this old womanhe finds the ideal Peer Gynt ; whilst in himself,the loafer, the braggart, the confederate of shammagicians, the Charleston speculator, the falseprophet, the dancing-girl's dupe, the bedlamemperor, the selfish thruster of the drowning maninto the waves, there is nothing heroic " nothingbut commonplace self-seeking and shirking,cowardice and sensuality, veiled only by theromantic fancies of the born liar. With thiscrowningly unreal realization he is left to face thebutton-moulder as best he can.

Peer Gynt has puzzled a good many people byIbsen's fantastic and subtle treatment of itsthesis. It is so far a difficult play, that the idealof unconditional self-realization, however familiarits suggestions may be to the ambitious reader,is not at all understood by him, much less for-ulated

as a proposition in metaphysics. Whenit is stated to him by some one who does under-tand

it, he unhesitatingly dismisses it as idiotic ;and it is because he is perfectly right in doingso " because it is idiotic in the most accuratesense of the term " that he finds such difficultyin recognizing it as the common ideal of his


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Peer Gynt. 55

own prototype, the pushing, competitive, success-loving man who is the hero of the modern world.

There is nothing novel in Ibsen's dramaticmethod of reducing these ideals to absurdity.Exactly as Cervantes took the old ideal ofchivalry, and shewed what came of a man attempt-ng

to act as if it were real, so Ibsen takes theideals of Brand and Peer Gynt, and treats themin the very same manner. Don Quixote acts asifhe were a perfect knight in a world of giants anddistressed damsels instead of a country gentle-an

in a land of innkeepers and farm wenches ;Brand acts as if he were the perfect Adam in aworld where, by resolute rejectionof all com-promise

with imperfection, it was immediatelypossible to change the rainbow " bridge betweenflesh and spirit " into as enduring a structure asthe tower of Babel was intended to be, therebyrestoring man to the condition in which hewalked with God in the garden ; and Peer Gynttries to act as if he had in him a special forcethat could be concentrated so as to prevailover all other forces. They ignore the real "ignore what they are and where they are, notonly, like Nelson, shutting their eyes to thesignals that a brave man may disregard, but in-anely

steering straight on the rocks that noresolution can prevail against. Observe thatneither Cervantes nor Ibsen is incredulous, in the


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$6 The Quintessence of Ibsenism.Philistine way, as to the power of ideals overmen. Don Quixote, Brand, and Peer Gynt are,all three, men of action seeking to realize theirideals in deeds. However ridiculous Don Quix-te

makes himself, you cannot dislike or despisehim, much less think that it would have beenbetter for him to have been a Philistine likeSancho ; and Peer Gynt, selfish rascal as he is,is not unlovable. Brand, made terrible by theconsequences of his idealism to others, is heroic.Their castles in the air are more beautiful thancastles of brick and mortar ; but one cannot livein them ; and they seduce men into pretendingthat every hovel is such a castle, just as PeerGynt pretended that the Trold king's den was apalace.

EMPEROR AND GALILEAN.When Ibsen, by merely giving the rein to the

creative impulse of his poetic nature, had pro-ucedBi'and and Peer Gynt, he was nearly forty.

His will, in setting his imagination to work, hadproduced a great puzzle for his intellect. In nocase does the difference between the will and theintellect come out more clearly than in that ofthe poet, save only that of the lover. Had Ibsendied in 1867, he, like many another great poet,would have gone to his grave without havingever rationally understood his own meaning.


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Emperor and Galilean. 57Nay, if in that year an intellectual expert " acommentator, as we call him " had gone to Ibsenand offered him the explanation of Brand whichhe himself must have arrived at before he con-structed

Ghosts and The Wild Duck, he wouldperhaps have repudiated it with as much disgustas a maiden would feel if anyone were brutalenough to give her the physiological rationale ofher dreams of meeting a fairy prince. It isonly the naif who goes to the creative artist withabsolute confidence in receiving an answer tohis " What does this passage mean ? " That isthe very question which the poet's own intellect,which had no part in the conception of the poem,may be asking him. And this curiosity of theintellect " this restless life in it which differen-iates

it from dead machinery, and which troublesour lesser artists but little,is one of the marksof the greater sort. Shakespear, in Hamlet, madea drama of the self-questioning that came uponhim when his intellect rose up in alarm, as wellit might, against the vulgar optimism of his HenryF., and yet could mend it to no better purposethan by the equally vulgar pessimism of Troilusand Cressida, Dante took pains to understandhimself: so did Goethe. Richard Wagner, oneof the greatest poets of our own day, has left usas many volumes of criticism of art and life ashe has left musical scores ; and he has expressly


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5 8 The Quintessence of Ibsenisni.described how the intellectual activity which hebrought to the analysis of his music dramas wasin abeyance during their creation. Just so dowe find Ibsen, after composing his two great dra-atic

poems, entering on a struggle to becomeintellectually conscious of what he had done.

We have seen that with Shakespear such aneffort became itself creative and produced adrama of questioning. With Ibsen the samething occurred : he harked back to an abandonedprojectof his, and wrote two huge dramas on thesubject of the apostasy of the Emperor Julian.In this work we find him at first preoccupiedwith a piece of old-fashioned freethinking " thedilemma that moral responsibility presupposesfree-will, and that free-will sets man above God.Cain, who slew because he willed, willed becausehe must, and must have willed to slay becausehe was himself, comes upon the stage to claimthat murder is fertile, and death the ground oflife, though he cannot say what is the groundof death. Judas, who betrayed under the samenecessity, wants to know whether, since theMaster chose him, he chose him foreknowingly.This part of the drama has no very deep signi-icance.

It is easy to invent conundrums whichdogmatic evangelicalism cannot answer ; and nodoubt, whilst it was still a nine days' wonder thatevangelicalism could not solve all enigmas, such


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Emperor and Galilean. 59invention seemed something much deeper thanthe mere intellectual chess-play which

it is seento be now that the nine days are past. In hisoccasional weakness for such conundrums, andlater on in his harping on the hereditary trans-ission

of disease, we see Ibsen's active intellectbusy, not only with the problems peculiar to hisown plays, but with the fatalism and pessimismof the middle of our century, when the typicaladvanced culture was attainable by readingStrauss's Leben Jesu, the popularizations ofHelmholtz and Darwin by Tyndall and Hux-ey,

and George Eliot's novels, vainly protestedagainst by Ruskin as peopled with " the sweep-ngs

of a Pentonville omnibus." The traces ofthis period in Ibsen's writings show how well heknew the crushing weight with which the sordidcares of the ordinary struggle for money andrespectability fell on the world when the romanceof the creeds was discredited, and progressseemed for the moment to mean, not the growthof the spirit of man, but an effect of the sur-vival

of the fittest brought about by the destruc-ionof the unfit, all the most frightful examples

of this systematic destruction being thrust intothe utmost prominence by those who were fight-ng

the Church with Mill's favourite dialecticalweapon, the incompiatibility of divine omnipo-ence

with divine benevolence. His plays are


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6o The Quintessence of Ibsenisin.full of evidence of his overwhelming sense ofthe necessity for rousing the individual intoself-assertion against this numbing fatalism;and yet he never seems to have freed hisintellect wholly from an acceptance of its scien-ific

validity. That it only accounted for pro-ressat all on the hypothesis of a continuous

increase in the severity of the conditions ofexistence, " that is, on an assumption of justthereverse of what was actually taking place "appears to have escaped Ibsen as c

shaw, bernard - the quintessence of ibsenism

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