23 May: Boreham on Henrik Ibsen

A Literary Cave Man
It is high-time that Henrik Ibsen was given a more worthy place in the popular esteem; and Mr. A. E. Zucker is to be congratulated on having done his best to secure that elevation for him. Mr. Zucker has made it his business to visit the scenes of Ibsen's life in Norway. He has chatted with people who knew the great Scandinavian dramatist and has caught the atmosphere from which some of his most striking work evolved. As a result of his studies and investigations, Mr. Zucker is convinced that a very wealthy gold mine awaits our exploitation in the somewhat neglected works of Ibsen, and he urges us to appropriate this unclaimed wealth without a moment's delay.

Those who have devoted a little attention to Ibsen will readily accept Mr. Zucker's conclusions. Indeed, it is difficult to decide as to which is the most fascinating—the personality, the career, or the dramas of this really remarkable man. He is one of the world's outstanding originals, belonging to no recognised class and conforming to no regular type. Grim, silent, taciturn, he stands severely alone. Even in his lifetime he gloried in anything that would cut him off from the main current of humanity. Without indulging in any vapid affectations, he loved to sink into himself and to place an impassable barrier between himself and the great mass of his fellows.

When he was a youth in his teens, apprentice to an apothecary at Grimstad, it was said of him that he walked about the narrow streets of that quaint little town like a mystery sealed with seven seals. To the last day of his life he kept on his writing-table a small ivory tray containing a number of grotesque figures, a wooden bear, a tiny devil, two or three cats—one of them playing to a fiddle—and some rabbits. "I never write a single line of my dramas," he used to say, "without having that tray and its occupants before me on my table. I could not write without them. But why I use them, and how, this is my own secret.” The probability is that the odd little figures possessed no real significance at all: they were a species of incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo: but they widened the charm that separated their owner from the common herd: they established a no-man's-land across which other men had to gaze at him in mystification, and that was all he cared. He built a wall between himself and the rest of the world, and, hiding behind it, laughed up his sleeve at the bewildered multitude on the other side.

The explanatory secret of his cave-man attitude is that he never forgave the fates for the scurvy trick they played him as a boy. The hardships and privations of his early days account for the acidity and acerbity that tincture all his writings. On the threshold of life he met with a bitter and crushing disappointment. He was born into a wealthy home, a home distinguished by luxury and social eminence, as well as by culture, delicacy and refinement. His father was a kind of village squire. But when Henrik was eight years of age, his father's fortunes were whelmed in disaster, and the family was reduced at one blow from affluence to poverty. A boy of eight is at the worst possible age to face so devastating a catastrophe. He is old enough to feel the pinch and to cherish rebellion against the humiliation in which he has become involved, without being able to understand and appreciate the justice of the forces that have compassed his wretchedness. Ibsen's proud young spirit received a wound, in that early crisis, from which it never recovered. He was soured from his youth. He bore a grudge against the social order to the end of his days. He writhed in secret as he reflected on the liberal education that he had once hoped to enjoy. During the years that he had expected to spend at the best universities in Europe, he was washing bottles in an apothecary's yard, and running messages about the muddy by-ways of Grimstad.

On one point, however, he registered a stern and irrevocable resolve. Before the crash came upon him, he had promised himself that he should be a poet. Why should poverty deprive him of that prospect? He set his teeth and vowed that, come what might, he would still utter the thoughts that were surging for expression within his soul. Let fate do her worst: he would sing his glorious songs in spite of her! And the really notable thing about his extraordinary career is that he did.

Mr. Zucker thinks that Ibsen has never been understood. He is probably right. Men of such a temper as Ibsen court misunderstanding, perhaps enjoy it. Even his contemporaries were baffled by him. Some of the most cultured and most patient critics of his time referred to him as a hopeless tangle of abnormality, a dismal crank, an overweening and incorrigible egotist. And those who were less cultured or less patient declared roundly that he was mad! Those who knew him intimately, however, discovered that he deserved none of these severe strictures. He was a little out of love with humanity in general and very much out of love with Norwegians in particular. As a results of these prejudices, he was too prone to cherish cynical views of the universe and to express topsy-turvy criticisms of life. But that is the worst that can justly be laid to his charge. Mr. William Archer took the trouble to know him, and he assures us that the venture was well worth while.

The keynote of Ibsen's personality was distinction, Mr. Archer tells us. It was not that he pretended to be different from other men: he was naturally and fundamentally different. "No one who saw him in his later years," says Mr. Archer, "could doubt that he was a born aristocrat. I met him for the first time in 1881. He had then put off the Bohemian and put on the reserved, correct, punctilious man of the world. He had the air of a polished statesman or diplomatist." To everybody with whom he came in contact, another of his friends assures us he gave the impression of dignity and importance.

In personal appearance he stood below rather than above the middle height; his whole frame, like the frame of a cave-man, suggested pugnacious combativeness and stupendous strength: his face, enveloped in grey hair and shaggy beard, invariably wore a look of austere and resolute determination: his mouth was ever firmly set, and above his steady and deeply-set eyes towered a powerful and commanding forehead. He cut a striking and impressive figure: and those who have taken the trouble to sit at his feet will recognise that it is but the symbol of much that is vigorous and arresting in his work. He is always the cave-man, though a cave-man transfigured and softened by culture.

From the moment at which he first put pen to paper, he made men feel that there was something in him. People recognised his genius, although his verses were too stinging, and possibly too true, to be popular. With pitiless virility, he told his countrymen their faults, holding the mirror to their faces at the most unfortunate moments. They were, he politely informed them, hesitating, weak, self-centred, shallow-minded, white-blooded, faint-hearted, utterly incapable of individual greatness or of national glory. Few people relish being lectured in this fashion, and, in consequence, Ibsen's triumph was retarded. But it came. Little by little he conquered his world.

In 1863, when he was thirty-five years of age, having a wife and child to support, he entreated the King of Norway to grant him such a pension as had been granted to his friend and rival, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and he pleaded that his "Vikings of Heligoland"—his best-paid work—had brought him altogether less than fifty pounds. At the moment his prayer for help fell upon deaf ears, but three years later a pension of eighty pounds a year was granted him. It seemed like the turning of the tide. From that hour nothing could go wrong with him. He went from triumph to triumph until, on his seventieth birthday, all Europe heaped its wealthiest honours on his head.

In accounting for this phenomenal success, Mr. Archer says that Ibsen is unrivalled in three important respects. His superb gift of imagination and invention, his searching criticism of life from an ethico-psychological standpoint, and his novel and masterly dramatic technique have never been equalled. He was the first great dramatist to compel actors and actresses to speak on the stage pretty much as ordinary men and women do speak in this matter-of-fact and work-a-day world. Holding that the theatre might be made a potent agency for self-revelation and self-realisation, he wrote some of the most heart-searching and thought-provoking plays that have ever been staged. In these, and many other important respects, he revolutionised the old dramatic ideals. Ibsen is absolutely unique: the world has never seen anything like him: and it is to be hoped that Mr. Zucker’s appeal will have the effect of introducing him to many thoughtful people to whom he is at present an utter stranger.

F W Boreham

Image: Henrik Ibsen