CHAPTER VII

_THE REAL IBSEN_

In reading Nordau’s chapter on Ibsen, one cannot help wondering why our alienist has given his book the form he has. The feeling which the preceding contents of his work have more or less inspired—that there is a discrepancy between the apparent plan of the work and its execution—almost ripens into conviction on the perusal of his chapter on Ibsen.

He says in his dedication to Professor Lombroso: “Now I have undertaken the work of investigating the tendencies of the fashion in art and literature, of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia.” He also says that he “ventures to fill a void in your [Lombroso’s] powerful system.” From what he says higher up on the same page about the power of books and works of art to influence the masses, and his many hints in other parts of the book, as, for example, in its concluding pages, we must understand that his great object is to do what he can to arrest the downward movement of human intelligence.

He thus assumes that there is a degenerating process going on throughout civilization, but attentive readers of his book feel the whole time that this assumption, far from being proved to be correct, rests on data supplied by Nordau, which strongly warn his readers to accept them only with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, there are a host of indications in all civilized countries pointing to an increase in intellectual power, moral strength, and æsthetic refinement. Some of these indications would probably not be undervalued by Nordau himself: the rapid progress of science, the increasing education among the masses, the large number of newspapers and periodicals dealing intelligently with various branches of knowledge, professions, and trades, the wider application of scientific methods to industry, wonderful inventions, not the outcome of discovery, but of intelligent induction, the decay of superstition, love of investigation, etc. Nordau, having allowed that the test of a sound mind is its ability to attend rationally to one’s business, ought to recognize that the growth of intellectual power is manifest in improved business methods, skill, manufacturing, complicated and daring financial schemes, ingenious co-operative systems, well-managed and disciplined trades’-unions, nay, even cleverly laid plots to defraud.

An increasing moral strength is proved by the growth of the altruistic feeling, the devotion with which the cause of humanity, morality, and progress is served by people who, thanks to scientific scepticism, expect no reward in another world; the greater sincerity observable in all religious bodies, the magnitude of charitable institutions, the magnificent heroism displayed by captains and crews on sinking ships, by our life-boat men in attempting to save the shipwrecked, by our colliers’ efforts to rescue the victims of explosions, etc. The great victories of the Germans over the French and the complete success of the commanders’ daring tactics have been largely, and probably correctly, ascribed to the moral qualities of the German army, while the utter defeat of the French cannot be ascribed to the want of moral qualities, but to bad leadership. A quarter of a century has elapsed since the Franco-German war, but there is no reason to believe that the moral qualities of the German army have degenerated. That no degeneracy has taken place in the English, French, and Italian armies has been proved by the Chitral expedition, by the French war with Madagascar, and by the Italian operations in Africa.

If, despite these manifest signs of growing intellectual power and moral strength, Nordau’s deep insight into psychological matters has revealed to him a mental degeneracy in the civilized world, his way of investigating such decay, his mode of dealing with it, and especially the causes he attributes to it, are too vacillating, too contradictory, and too biassed to inspire confidence. While sometimes, as in his chapter entitled “Etiology,” he refers to such causes as the increase in the consumption of spirits and tobacco, the factory system, overwork, overcrowding—all causes palpable to all who have given any attention to social questions,—in the rest of his book he seems to regard certain popular writers and artists as the great cause of general degeneration who should be specially noticed. This contradiction cannot be explained away on the plea that his book is only part of a wider investigation which has already been made, or might be made, regarding the causes of degeneration, and that, so long as his work is intended to treat of the influence of literature and art, his ignoring of other causes is legitimate. If an effect is first attributed to one cause and then to another, we may be sure that there is something wrong with the reasoning. We cannot prove first that the tendency to hysteria, so common in people engaged in a certain class of business, is due to overwork, and afterwards prove that the same tendency in the same people is due to Rossetti’s pictures or to Swinburne’s poems.

Nordau never furnishes an explanation of the enormous importance he attaches to the influence of writers and artists, and the small importance he attaches to the more palpable causes of degeneration, of the existence of some of which he is aware. Nor does he tell us how he reconciles the two facts, alternately insisted upon by him, that degeneration in artists is the cause of degeneration in their surroundings; and again, that the degeneration of their surroundings is the cause of degeneration in artists and authors.

If such artists and authors as Nordau believes to be degenerate are the effect of degeneration all round, they are surely the smallest and least deplorable results, and it was certainly not worth while to write so bulky a volume about them. Nordau mentions about a score; and what is a score compared to the mass of humanity, or to the five hundred million people included in western civilization? A degeneration that would not have other results than that of producing twenty degenerate men, who, though they are in many respects a source of enjoyment to many, may have a grain of insanity in their brains, would not be worth noticing. If, on the other hand, these supposed degenerates are not what, to the ordinary mind, they decidedly appear to be—the children of their time—but the actual causes of such serious psychological effects which statistics seem to reveal, we are face to face with a phenomenon which surely demanded a different method of investigation.

The real connection between the causes and the effects should have been ascertained. For instance, the most alarming feature of degeneration in England—that weak-mindedness which leads to drunkenness—should have been connected with the mystical painters and poets, and should have been proved not to have been the result of those causes which seem palpable to every man. Then the influence of individuals on the masses in general should have been ascertained. History offers a wide field for such an investigation. If it had been found that authors and artists exercise less influence than other individuals, such as sovereigns, statesmen, prophets, reformers, revolutionary leaders, discoverers, explorers, and others, the influence of these should have at first been studied, and what could not be attributed to them might have been laid at the door of artists and authors.

In examining history, old and new, we are struck with the extremely slight effects which have been produced by _littérateurs_ and artists, and the enormous, all-powerful influence exercised by other individuals. Books have influenced books, poets have influenced poets, painters have influenced painters, but the political, social, intellectual, moral, and æsthetical development of a nation has over and over again been completely determined by men who have been neither artists nor authors.

In modern times the same fact is palpable. Has ever the world been influenced more than by such men as Cavour, Prince Bismarck, Mr. Gladstone, Napoleon III.? and how might not the fate of humanity be determined in the near future by such men as, for example, the Emperor of Germany and the Czar of Russia? On the mental qualities of the Emperor of Germany depends largely whether Germany is to be crushed under the army system; whether it is to be ruined by financial blunderings; whether there shall be peaceful development of its resources, or war to the knife between its classes; whether healthy reforms shall gradually clear away its social anomalies, or whether a revolution of unprecedented atrocity shall uproot its very foundations; whether its inhabitants shall develop those characteristics to which peace and happiness are conducive, or those which would inevitably be fostered if Germany were made the battle-field of modern armies.

On the mental qualities of the Czar depend directly the destiny of a hundred million people, and indirectly the peace of the world. Russia is only too willing to progress under an imperial leader. On the occasion of his accession to the throne and his marriage, millions of people anxiously scanned his portrait and tried to read in his features the fate of Europe. The presence of lines supposed to indicate weak character produced prophecies of clerical domination, opposition to progress, and death to Russia; while a kindly expression of the eyes inspired many with hopes of a new era for Tolstoi’s unfortunate countrymen.

It is not only personages of high rank and sovereign power whose mental state is of utmost importance to humanity. The political situation in most countries is capable of producing at any moment a man who, without being either an author or an artist, might be able to change the destiny of nations. It is not the opportunity that is wanting, it is the men. France is panting for a man. The working classes in America and in England stand in need of a good leader. In Germany Liebknecht threatens to divide the power with the Emperor. A political Tolstoi might, at the head of the Russian people, sweep the recreant bureaucrats from his Fatherland.

It is then sovereigns, politicians, and popular leaders whose mental state is of the utmost importance, and whose influence may overwhelmingly determine the mental and moral development of humanity. An answer to the question whether they are degenerates, or whether they are of mentally or morally sound mind, is momentous to the whole civilized world, especially if it be admitted that the minds of the race are so susceptible of being moulded by the minds of influential men.

But who are the men whom Nordau blames for the degeneracy for which he finds the proof in statistics? Poets and artists, whose very names are known only to the educated classes, and who for the most part supply what the market demands, or simply reflect the society around them. The most surprising of all is that he himself denies any power or any talent in some of these men, calling them—to omit his worse epithets—such names as drivelling idiots, weak-minded graphomaniacs, etc.

One condition seems however necessary before a man can receive the compliment of being called names by Nordau—he must have attracted public attention. We have therefore said, and repeat it, that his desperate attempt to make out Ibsen to be a degenerate renders it impossible to form a clear idea of his object, or of his reasons, for the methods he has adopted.

Henrik Ibsen aims not at being a prophet, a teacher, or a regenerator of mankind either by literary or scientific methods. No one can detect in his works special ethics, or particular religious or social views. It is characteristic of his pieces—and according to many of his opponents a great fault in them—that he points no moral, that the questions involved remain at the end of the piece exactly where they were at the beginning, that his heroes and heroines are no heroes and no heroines, and cannot serve as models of conduct. His opponents and admirers alike complain that they cannot get at his meaning, and that he will not explain himself. It is therefore surprising that there should be so much talk about the influence he exercises, and that Nordau himself should speak about “Ibsen’s dogmas,” “Ibsen’s code of morals,” and about Ibsen himself as a “reformer.”

Those who speak about Ibsen’s influence on the ethics of our time cannot, as a rule, give any explanation of their meaning which can justify the importance they attach to it. They are apt to point to his influence on the English drama and blame him for certain of its objectionable features. But to those who understand his pieces it is perfectly clear that he has not been followed by English dramatists in such things as have made him famous and popular. They have contented themselves with imitating certain situations and with referring to some objectionable feature in modern society, which Ibsen does reluctantly, compelled to do so by the situation, and in order to emphasize types of character which are only too common in every civilized country, but are so closely draped in hypocrisy as to require the great dramatist’s lens to show them up. His imitators however exemplify entirely exceptional cases and conjure up characters the prototypes of which it would be extremely hard to find. He aims at presenting stern reality; they aim at producing risky situations. Indeed, his imitators cannot be said to have been influenced by him more than has his brilliant parodist, Mr. F. Anstey.

In Germany, as in the Scandinavian countries, complaints are sometimes raised against Ibsen’s influence on women, especially young women. Our daughters are getting Ibsenized, is the cry raised by a number of Philistine parents. It is perhaps natural that Ibsen’s influence on women in those countries, where the staging of Ibsen’s pieces recalls more familiar presentations should be greater than in England, where the Norwegian manner of life is but little known. But too much weight might easily be attached to the difference in acquaintance with Norway. There is a far more powerful reason why Ibsen’s so-called influence should appear to be more marked on German and Norwegian women than on English women.

With the exception of the United States, there is no country in the world where respectable women are better treated than in England. An old adage says, with a great deal of truth, that the wife of the German is his slave, the wife of the Frenchman is his mistress, and the wife of the Englishman is the queen of his house. The German woman certainly has of old held a position in her home which might well lead her to envy the English woman, and as the Scandinavian countries have been largely affected by Germany in their social manners and habits, the women of these countries have ample cause for dissatisfaction. Since the time of Frederika Bremer, a woman’s revolt has been brewing in the Scandinavian countries, and the aspirations for more liberty, a more natural life, and more happiness have been constantly becoming stronger, and were highly developed before Ibsen’s first piece appeared. Besides, the spread of English fiction in Germany and in the northern countries of Europe has shown the women of those countries that a happier life is quite possible.

The road to the realization of such aspirations was however barred by custom and the selfish view of the question taken by the men. They had no objection to high-spirited, talented, well-dressed, and lively women, whose attractions could evoke in them romantic and ardent feelings; and a great many knew well enough that leisure, exemption from hard work, good food, plenty of exercise, suitable friends, artistic surroundings, good books, a fair amount of pleasure, and considerate treatment were required to transform a young woman into that feminine ideal which they worshipped in their imagination. But they repudiated entirely the idea of having such ideals in their wives. It would have clashed far too much with the traditional type of a good wife, and to marry one deviating from this type would have set the whole circle of acquaintances talking. Besides, a wife conforming to the ideal was considered an expensive luxury, leading to waste of money which could be much better employed.

Mothers of girls, well acquainted with the marriage market, consequently exerted all their energy to form their daughters for the positions they were expected to occupy. House-cleaning, washing, cooking, darning, etc.,—this was what they had to learn. A demure demeanour was what they had to practise. The society of men was what they had to avoid. Romantic ideas had, above all, to be suppressed, and only such love as would come after marriage, or at least after betrothal, was considered legitimate and decent.

A great feature in their education was to closely observe the evils and troubles which followed upon poverty, and how much more comfortable life would be with a prosperous though unattractive husband than with a beloved man who might not succeed in the world. The idea of refusing a proposal of marriage from a well-to-do man, however old and prosy, was regarded as preposterous, and any respectable girl dreaming of such a thing would have been considered as a romantic, ungrateful hussy.

As the men seldom married young, the girls were taught to ask no questions about their past, and were trained to sacrifice all their ideals of purity, their dreams of love, what a free woman would call her self-respect, their future happiness, their healthful youth, on the altar of Philistine respectability.

There are other ways of degrading women besides yoking them with an ox to a plough, and that they were degraded and de-naturalized the thinking German and Scandinavian women had felt long before Ibsen wrote plays. The struggle for better treatment was however extremely weak and the progress towards emancipation extremely slow. Just as oppressive government, with its police persecution, gags open discontent and drives the forces of revolt under ground, so the tyranny over the German and Scandinavian women—when tradition and prejudice prevented open manifestations—developed in the hearts of women, especially among the most gifted, a dangerously strong spirit of revolt.

Already at the time when Ibsen began to write there were numerous but isolated outbreaks. The old treatment, which generally resulted in turning the married woman into a dull, despondent house-slave, a soured invalid, a nagging scold, or a gossiping zany, began to produce scoffing Aspasias, neurotic adventuresses, and here and there avenging furies.

This tendency to revolt among the women was stronger in Norway than in the other countries, because it developed parallel with that ethical awakening—the new _Aand_[1]—which during the latter part of this century has taken possession of so many Norwegian minds; also because the strongly imaginative and contemplative character of the Norwegian people, and the intensely emotional nature of their women, led them to brood over their wrongs in a thoroughly Norwegian fashion. Better education and wide reading tended in the same direction.

[Footnote 1: _Aand_, the Norwegian for spirit, inspiration.]

Ibsen has therefore not Ibsenized the Scandinavian ladies. He has simply seized upon a social phenomenon and, understanding its gravity, has held it up to his contemporaries for a study and a warning.

Nordau, having committed the egregious mistake of believing that Ibsen has invented whereas he has in reality only copied, and that a social phenomenon which is natural to intellectual and moral progress is a result of Ibsen’s writings, is, in his capacity of the most German of Germans, naturally wroth with Ibsen for representing as a social evil what a normal sound-minded common-sense German—the very type of the non-degenerate—would consider as a useful and comfortable arrangement. There are several excuses for Nordau’s belief that Ibsen misrepresents reality. The improvement in woman’s status in society has no doubt advanced more in Germany than in the Scandinavian countries. It is possible that the Dowager Empress’s influence as an Englishwoman has not been so great as is generally supposed, but there can be little doubt that English novels, from Charlotte Bronté’s _Jane Eyre_ upwards, have considerably furthered justice towards German women. The close business connections between Germany and England, the numerous Germans who have had a long experience of English life, have no doubt done much to spread English social views in Germany.

The German women may therefore now have less cause for discontent and revolt than the Scandinavian women, and it is excusable if the Germans consider that they treat them fairly and well.

To observing Englishmen who visit Germany it is however clear that the whole Philistine idea of the housewife is still prevailing in that country. A great number of husbands consider it a distinct advantage to be able to throw off all restraint in their own homes and to compel their wives to accommodate themselves as well as they can to their whims, their habits, their indulgences. That exasperating type, the house-tyrant, which is found in all countries, and not seldom in England, is especially prevalent in Germany.

German men are well aware that their wives have nothing in common with the fascinating ideal woman of their imagination, and they are quite satisfied that it should be so. Their work, their studies, their profession, or their business demands all their attention, and they could not dream of dismissing them from their minds when they enter their homes. A woman who would distract her husband’s attention from such important subjects would be an impediment to his success, while the typical housewife, by her cares and ministrations, furthers it. Like most men, Germans have chivalrous leanings, and enjoy a courteous intercourse with ladies, but it is generally not their wives who reap the advantages of this taste. It is the other ladies, those they meet in society, and not seldom do they muster all their powers of gallantry, all their means of pleasing, and all their faculty to amuse in the company of women of light character, often in every respect inferior to their wives.

It is those German women who feel that their happiness and their lives have been sacrificed, not for their husbands, but to a vicious conception of married life, who sympathize with the women of Ibsen, and have thus contributed largely to the fame of that dramatist in Germany.

Ibsen has not Ibsenized the German ladies, but his pieces have revealed the existence of a grudge long harboured by German women.

It is only just to record that, though Englishwomen, especially those who live and are treated up to the English ideal, as we mentioned before, live under much happier circumstances as children, girls, _fiancées_, and wives, there are many of our countrywomen whose marriages have been a cruel disillusion. Many Englishmen marry too young, before they know their own minds, and under the feverish impulse of a first love. When such young husbands are thoughtless, selfish, or when they have made a bad choice, a miserable married life is the result. In a great number of young households happiness prevails, thanks to the strong-mindedness and tact of the young wife, who can take care of herself and of her husband also. But thousands of marriages turn out utter failures, not for want of love, but from the husband’s utter ignorance of how to take care of his wife’s health, beauty, and happiness.

Though it is the fashion in this country not to adapt but to translate literally Ibsen’s pieces, there would be no difficulty to so adapt them as to render them exact representations of the state of many an English home. And this is sufficient to explain his fame in England. Here, as on the continent, it is the selfish, mean, bullying husbands who cannot find any sense in Ibsen’s pieces, and who are extremely shocked at what they consider Ibsen’s perversion in attempting to enlist, by inexplicable devices, the sympathies of the audience for the erring wife, when these should be vouchsafed to the husband, who appears to be such a respectable, common-sense man.

When Ibsen thus calls attention to the importance and the gravity of the feeling of revolt which has long rankled in the minds of thinking women all over the world, and which manifested itself long before Ibsen’s pieces were known outside Norway, he cannot fairly be said to be responsible for the growing discontent. In reality, he has rendered the world a great service: for the new views and aspirations of modern educated women can neither be suppressed nor ignored without considerable danger to society.

In order to understand that the demand for the purification of marriage is not a transitory whim, it will suffice to consider who made the marriage laws, and, what is more important, who inaugurated the traditional views concerning them. Men alone did. Not the young men, who would be largely swayed by the yearning for true love and by chivalrous considerations, but the law-makers of old; that is to say, elderly men of influence and fortune. In the olden times, when the foundations of social customs were laid, the rights of women were considerably less respected than in our days; and under such circumstances the law-makers did not feel called upon to consider woman to any large extent, but made laws and introduced customs which suited themselves. What they wanted was, firstly, to marry young and beautiful wives, despite all objections that might be raised against their age, their looks, or their characters, and without much troublesome courtship; and, secondly, to keep their young wives in subjection by sheer force and legal compulsion.

It is not reasonable to suppose that the fair sex should submit for ever to such treatment, and, as the women in the English-speaking countries have already gained large concessions, it is natural that their sisters in the rest of the civilized world should struggle for reform.

It is therefore difficult to see why Nordau should consider Ibsen’s influence so dangerous to society as to deem it necessary to hold him up as a degenerate. The enigma becomes more puzzling when we find that Nordau frankly allows that Ibsen has great merits and great talents. He says, for instance: “Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power.” “He has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and impressive manner that which has excited his feelings.” “He has the capacity for imagining situations in which the characters are forced to turn inside out their inmost nature, in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds, and moods of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible to the senses but potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature, and in words.” “He knows how to group events into living frescoes possessing the charm of significant pictures... not like Wagner, with strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating vision into the background of souls and the conditions of humanity.... But he does not allow the imagination of the spectator to run riot in mere spectacles; he forces them into moods, he binds them by his spell in circles of ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.” “The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time... Each of the terse words which suffice him has something of the nature of a peep-hole, through which limitless vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples of all ages have few situations at once so perfectly simple and so irresistibly affecting.”

Further on he again says: “It must be acknowledged that Ibsen has created some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare... None the less no poet since the illustrious Spanish master (Cervantes) has succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain, jolly, healthy common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety as to things eternal, and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, obvious duties without a suspicion of higher moral obligations, as this Gina.... Hjalmar also is a perfect creation, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the cogent temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entrancingly that ‘self-restraint’ in every word which, as Goethe says, ‘reveals the master.’”

We have quoted somewhat lengthily from this eulogy of Ibsen in order to render justice both to him and to Nordau. There is no passage in Nordau’s book which displays more insight into dramatic art and a more intelligent appreciation of some of the subtle but marvellous merits of Ibsen’s plays. We should not have thought it possible that so keen an appreciation could have been formed without seeing Ibsen’s pieces acted in the original language. This eulogy becomes all the more valuable when we remember that it emanates from one of Ibsen’s opponents—from a man who would fain restrain Ibsen from writing at all, and who evidently has not paid any attention to the slow but important social struggle which Ibsen so frequently illustrates.

Most people who have read these and other acknowledgments on the part of Nordau of Ibsen’s talent, will be struck with the reckless manner in which Nordau defeats his own object. He wishes to warn the world against “degenerates” of Ibsen’s type, and at the same time praises him as few writers have been praised, seemingly without considering that in this manner he inspires thousands of young writers with the ambition to be degenerates as Ibsen is.

To the average reader Nordau suggests the idea of the impossibility of reconciling so much power, genius, talent, and craftsmanship with decayed mental faculties. This all the more as Ibsen’s pieces are financial successes, and he consequently shows a solid capacity for the management of his own affairs, which, as Nordau has already told us, and every alienist would tell us, is the safest test of a sound brain. The conclusion seems inevitable that Nordau is either utterly wrong when he sees all these merits in Ibsen’s work, or else when he considers him to be degenerate.

In examining the grounds on which Nordau strives to establish his theory of degeneracy we shall no doubt find that the latter alternative is the true one.

Nordau first impeaches Ibsen’s reputation for realism, but takes this term in its most literal sense. The stage has its limitations, and the dramatist must have a certain licence in the creating of his situations. Ibsen is not called a realist because all that he represents on the stage is in closer conformity with reality than the representations of practically any other dramatist ever were, but because his characters, besides being individually true to nature, are types—strongly coloured types, it may be, but not too strongly coloured to be understood by an average audience. In a piece not intended to be played the characters may be more delicately moulded, but when they are to be grasped in a few flashes before the footlights they must, like the statue intended for an elevated position, be hewn in bold proportions.

In order to show how unreal Ibsen is, Nordau asks whether it is probable that the joiner, Engstrand (in _Ghosts_), wishing to open a tavern for sailors, should call upon his own daughter to be the odalisque of his “establishment.” By using the word “odalisque,” and by placing the word “establishment” between inverted commas, he gives a distorted idea of the tavern Engstrand is going to open. It is a question of a real tavern, not of an “establishment.” Girls in similar taverns in Norway are of course exposed to temptations and sometimes to insults, but they are by no means necessarily unchaste. In selecting the employment in the tavern, Ibsen succeeds in giving an insight into the Philistine character of Engstrand, who for the sake of money would risk his daughter’s reputation, but who could always fall back on the excuse that he did not intend to ruin her.

Nordau may be right when he says that no Paris doctor would have told Oswald Alving in _Ghosts_ that he had softening of the brain. But Ibsen does not say “softening of the brain”; he makes Alving say “a kind of softening of the brain,” an expression which might very well be Oswald’s interpretation of what the doctor had told him in very guarded words. Moreover it is not as an alienist that Ibsen has gained his fame; it is as a dramatist.

Nordau quotes as another example of unreality, the sense in which the term “society” is used by the characters in the _Pillars of Society_. This is an error into which Nordau has evidently been led by reading a bad German translation of the piece. Ibsen’s characters do not mean “social edifice,” as Nordau pedantically will have it, but the well-to-do people in the community.

Again, he thinks that excuse very unreal which Berneck gives to his foreman, whom he has not taken into his confidence. But this unreality is precisely what Ibsen wishes the public to see, and he has evidently not accentuated the unreality sufficiently, as this has escaped even Nordau. Nordau does not find the speech of Pastor Rörlund realistic enough. The fact is that the speech is a delightful parody, in no way exaggerated, of those addresses which toadying sycophants all the world over are in the habit of delivering to a magnate whom they desire to propitiate. Any one who has heard such a speech in Norway will be amusedly surprised by its comic realism.

It would be tiresome to go minutely into the proofs of unreality Nordau finds in Ibsen’s pieces, and the bare mention of the following examples will suffice to show the futility of his attempt. He considers it impossible for a man of forty-three to inspire love, and this in Norway, where people develop and ripen so slowly. He thinks it unreal for an excitable girl to describe as a storm on the sea the passion which induces her to encourage her rival’s suicide, and then when the rival is out of the way patiently to devote a year and a half to gaining the love for which her sin was committed. Our alienist, who displays throughout his book an utter lack of the sense of the ridiculous, finds the scene between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in _The Lady from the Sea_ ridiculous, a scene which thousands of audiences have followed in breathless silence and with deep emotion.

The puzzle is why Nordau is so anxious to show that Ibsen is not a realist, and how his not being a realist can possibly be construed into an argument in favour of his insanity. Are then all the people who, as a matter of taste or as a matter of business, supply the public with unrealistic dramas to be considered more or less demented? If this is the case, what becomes of the mental sanity of Nordau’s great model, Goethe, the author of the intensely unreal _Faust_?

Referring to the theory of heredity, frequently alluded to in Ibsen’s works, Nordau says he cannot preserve his gravity when Ibsen displays his scientific or medical knowledge. Here again we are tempted to refer to the sandal-maker and the sandal-strings; but there is actually no occasion to do so, because Ibsen displaying his medical knowledge is a picture conjured up by Nordau’s own imagination. We do not know what Ibsen does in his private life, but in his dramatic works he does not display his medical knowledge. What suits Nordau’s purpose to give as Ibsen’s opinions are the opinions of his characters, who, being true to nature, speak as their prototypes in reality speak. It suits Ibsen’s dramatic purposes to make use of certain views on heredity, and he is all the more entitled to do so as such opinions are very prevalent nowadays, and not without exercising a considerable influence on people’s minds. Ibsen may have exactly the same opinion as his characters give expression to, or he may think the very opposite, but those who thoroughly understand Ibsen’s method will be convinced that he would not commit the mistake, so common among dramatists, of allowing his characters to reflect the author’s personality. When Regina, in _Ghosts_, in reply to Mrs. Alving, who is harping on heredity, says, “What must be, must be... I take after my mother I dare say,” she does not express Ibsen’s opinion about heredity, but that fatalistic notion which is unfortunately extremely common among women, especially when in trouble or at fault, and a reference to her mother is only a confirmation of her fatalistic belief, at which she clutches that she may rid herself of her responsibility.

If we must look for a tendency in Ibsen’s works, it might be found in his attempt to show up this generally prevailing weakness in will and character which Nordau himself finds everywhere and which he calls degeneration. Regina, as well as Oswald, are “frightful examples” of this weakness, and in placing them on the stage Ibsen has the same object as Nordau, namely, to exhibit a deplorable defect in modern society. Ibsen may therefore be looked upon as Nordau’s co-operator, and even precursor, because Ibsen’s characters are types of that very degeneration which Nordau desires to combat. In fact, the importance that our alienist attaches to Ibsen’s characters suggests the idea that if there were no Ibsen there would be no Nordau. By the aid of an extremely confused and distorted reasoning, he condemns Ibsen for that very weakness which he, like Nordau, has discovered in modern society and incarnated in his characters as a warning to his contemporaries.

If we had not a strong objection to the _tu quoque_ argument, and were not resolved to avoid it, we could here say a great deal about Nordau’s condemnation of Ibsen’s supposed illogical references to heredity, while Nordau himself yields to the temptation of using the absurdest logic in order to discover supposed proofs in favour of his own pet theories.

Even supposing that Ibsen did believe in heredity, is he not in harmony with his time? One does not require to be an alienist or a biologist to understand that the Darwinian theory of evolution is the theory of heredity; and one does not require to be very old to have observed that the characteristics of parents often repeat themselves in their children. In his criticism of Ibsen, Nordau seems to go too far when he casts discredit on the theory of heredity, with regard to which he himself goes to an extreme when he attributes to heredity the lurking belief in a personal God in the inmost recesses of the consciousness of certain scientists. The manner in which he refers to little Hedwig’s blindness will certainly induce his readers to infer that he himself does not believe in cases of hereditary blindness—an affliction which has however come within the knowledge of many. Nordau, in his purposeless eagerness to tear Ibsen down from his pedestal, seems to imagine that he would further his object if he could show that Ibsen is influenced by the religion of his childhood, of his youth, and of his country. To be influenced by such religion has been the case with many sane people of strong mind, especially in countries where the morality implanted in young children is based entirely on religious instruction. Even when a man ceases to believe literally all that has been taught him, it is natural that his religious thoughts should mould themselves on the early impressions, which then become symbols instead of fact. This is especially natural with people whose walk in life has precluded them from giving that absorbing attention to psychology and biology which to a sound mind is indispensable before it can master, or believe, the scientists’ theories of “mechanical causality,” and the annihilation of the conscious _Ego_. Nordau, like many other scientific enthusiasts, seems to labour under the impression that all the loud-voiced people, who affect complete irreligiosity, and who pose as free-thinkers, are really convinced that the scientific discovery of yesterday, which might be upset by the discovery of to-morrow, sufficiently explains the world and themselves. This is far from being the case. How often when we scratch the atheist do we not find the superstitiously devout. How many men could be found in the world who are so capable of satisfying all their curiosity regarding the unknown by scientific theories that they might be quoted in support of the artificiality of religious instincts? They would certainly number very few. And yet scientists of Nordau’s stamp are apt to regard such men as the only really sane ones, and the rest of humanity as to some extent degenerate.

But how does Nordau know anything about Ibsen’s religious opinions? He simply studies the characters in Ibsen’s pieces and takes for granted that Ibsen must necessarily hold the same opinions as his characters. This absurd assumption, indispensable to his purpose, leads him sometimes into ridiculous dilemmas from which he escapes in a not less ridiculous manner. When he finds that Ibsen has _dramatis personæ_ of diametrically opposed opinions and beliefs, he does not know which of them represents Ibsen’s opinions and Ibsen’s beliefs. Determined not to notice the simple fact that none of them represent Ibsen’s views, he falls back on the expediency of declaring that, because his characters differ, Ibsen does not know his own mind, a fact which in our alienist’s view points to degeneracy.

He quotes copiously from Ibsen’s pieces in order to show that those characters who have committed evil deeds, without having resigned themselves to being utterly bad, yearn for confession. From this we must conclude that Nordau considers a longing for confession in those who have sinned as an obsession and as pertaining to stigmata of degeneration. To make capital out of this, Nordau sticks hard to his assumption that Ibsen’s object is to preach some kind of creed by proclaiming his own opinions through his characters. Few people in the world really know what Ibsen’s final object and real aims are; but his immediate object, it will be granted, is to show his contemporaries what they really are, and so sternly and so cogently does he pursue this object that, while other dramatists show their spectators the defects of others, Ibsen lays bare their own.

In showing sinners’ yearnings for confession, Ibsen could not therefore be wrong unless a longing for confession in sinners is unreal or unusual. Far from being unusual, we find it in almost every human being, from the innocent child down to the brutal criminal. The police and law-court reports in England frequently relate cases in which men and women confess crimes which would never have been discovered, simply to satisfy a conscience yearning for confession. We have nothing to do here with the question as to whether this first step towards a better life is longed for in obedience to an instinct implanted in the emotional nature of man by a Creator, or whether it is the consequence of an inherited tendency originated by religious teaching and moral civil laws. We have only to deal with the fact that the conscience of all evil-doers, and especially of those who are willing to abandon evil and return to good, prompts them to confess. Nordau has only to consult a Catholic priest in order to learn how strong and general this yearning is.

It must also be remembered that confession, if not to priests yet to God, is part of the Lutheran creed prevailing in Norway, and that consequently confession is regarded by the people as the test of true repentance. Though auricular confession is not a sacrament in the Lutheran Church, the Norwegian ministers could tell Nordau how often sinners and criminals ease their consciences by confessing to them. It is hardly possible to write a serious dramatic piece without representing a struggle between good and evil. And how then could Ibsen write dramas true to Norwegian life, without instancing that yearning for confession which is the outward sign of the inward struggle between good and evil?

Nordau instances the French assassin Avinain, who before being guillotined gave out as his life’s motto “Never confess,” as an example of a strong and healthy mind—or, at least, he regards this motto as one which only a strong and healthy mind can follow. On the other hand, he regards confessing men as men “in whom the mechanism of inhibition is always disordered, and who therefore cannot escape from the impulse to confess when anything of an absorbing or exciting character exists in their consciousness.”

In this comparison Nordau omits the chief factor—the religious opinion, or the philosophy which necessarily determines whether the confession is a sign of strength or weakness. If the murderer Avinain was a confirmed atheist, and if his emotional nature was such as to glorify murder, then he had no impulse to confess, and consequently required no strength of mind to resist confession. If the man who glories in what is good—or, to use an expression of Nordau’s, who has social instincts, and consequently believes that confession is his duty and an heroic action—should shun the ordeal and prefer to spend the rest of his life as a self-despising hypocrite, this would be weak-mindedness. Of course Nordau may always argue that to believe in the good and in personal responsibility is in itself a sign of degeneration. But this would be simply to place the question on another plane, where we have already discussed it.

What is said here about confession applies equally to what Nordau says about redemption. It is not, as he states, an obsession of Ibsen’s, but a symbol very natural to a people of strong religious feelings. His characters could not possibly express their ideas and their emotions in any other way than that in which they have been in the habit of thinking all their lives.

Nordau cannot rid himself of the obsession that the dramatist must necessarily take a side in the squabble between religion and science, and between the devotees of different social panaceas, and seems exasperated because he cannot get at Ibsen’s real opinion on such questions. When he persists in his egregious error of taking the opinions of Ibsen’s characters as those of Ibsen, his mind gets into a maze, which leads him to the conclusion that it is Ibsen’s mind, not his own, that has got into a confused state. It is very common to find a man, who, by dint of study or by natural talent, has become an authority on one subject, so far losing his power of self-criticism as to believe himself a universal genius, capable of dogmatizing on every subject under the sun. It is this conceit that induces successful men to imagine that their natural specialty is not that one which has rendered them famous, but some other specialty for which in reality they have no aptitude whatever. A successful comedian believes himself to be hardly dealt with because he is not acknowledged as a tragedian. A musician considers himself an authority on the drama. The poet thinks he ought to have been a politician. Biologists imagine they would shine as social reformers.

It is because Ibsen has not yielded to this weakness, because he has not the conceit to lay down the law on questions outside his own province, but simply aspires to be a dramatist, that Nordau complains so bitterly of Ibsen’s omission to express a distinct opinion on all sorts of subjects on which Nordau burns to break a lance with him. He tilts against the opinions expressed by Ibsen’s characters with the wasted fury of Don Quixote attacking windmills.

We are at a loss to account for the contradictions of which Nordau appears to be guilty. Much of what he says in the latter part of his essay on Ibsen is in direct contradiction to what he says in the earlier part, where his praise of Ibsen’s talents and abilities is conspicuous. We will give an example of what we mean. He says at the beginning of his chapter: “Each of the terse words which suffice him [Ibsen] has something of the nature of a peep-hole, through which limitless vistas are obtained.” Towards the end of it he says: “Thus Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees at each shaking of the cardboard tube new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this toy, but adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always the same, inserted haphazard and united into mystical figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless arabesque.”

Can this contradiction be the result of his great trust in authorities, and has he made use of two that clash, or does he write for writing’s sake, differently each day according to the mood he happens to be in?

When Ibsen’s characters give expression to their yearnings for greater personal liberty, for a revolt against social traditions which threaten to wreck their lives, and which they have beheld wrecking the lives of hundreds around them, they are intended by the dramatist to show what is going on in modern society. Nordau of course concludes that Ibsen is an egomaniac who resents any bonds on his worst instincts. Supposing that Ibsen shares personally that same longing for more individual freedom which Nordau so warmly deprecates, it is evident that they differ simply because Nordau starts from the supposition that men’s instincts are necessarily bad, and Ibsen from the supposition that they are good.

The fundamental difference in opinion mainly springs from the different circumstances amongst which the two men have been born and brought up. The German, who has all his life been impressed with the necessity of officialism and police government, who has lived under the impression that his castle would be attacked by a lower caste when free to follow its inclinations, would naturally attach great importance to existing institutions. If he at the same time be illogical enough to sap at the root of that great order-producing institution—religion—and beholds that this safeguard is becoming more and more unreliable, he naturally looks for something to take its place.

The German social system, so unjust to the working classes, has naturally embittered the people and enlisted a number of working men into the revolutionary parties, and this growing army of so-called enemies to society naturally alarms the German middle-class man and prejudices him against the proletariat. Passions and destructive instincts, instilled by long suffering, he is apt to regard as human nature from which the worst must be expected. This explains many of Nordau’s contradictions. He wishes to abolish religion because its abolition would glorify science, but he wishes to retain the marriage laws because he fears that without them an unspeakable state of immorality would ensue. He denies a divine plan in creation which might account for the moral instinct in man, but he does not believe that morality has sprung from the only remaining source, namely, man’s experience of the advantages of morality. His habit of bowing to authorities causes him to believe that morality and a pure family life are the result of the marriage laws, and not that the marriage laws are the result of man’s love of morality and of a pure family life.

The Norwegian is born and brought up in a country where liberty has been the basis and safeguard of moral order; where few police are found in the cities, and where, throughout vast tracts of country, man’s good instincts are the only police; where the peasant and working classes have no desire or intention to attack the wealthy; where the people are religious because they are honest and not honest because they are religious; where self-esteem and justice would take the place of religion were it to crumble. The Norwegian has noticed that the poor are more generous than the rich, that the people are more honest than their officials, that the free man and woman are more moral than the tied ones, and that liberty elevates and oppressive laws degrade. If the Norwegian seems to attach little importance to legal marriage, it is because, in cleansing it from mercenary considerations and other low motives, he hopes to base it on such foundations as moral instinct, love, self-respect, honour, and possibly on religious belief, and thereby make it a life-long reality. It is not to gratify low instincts and licentious passions, as Nordau would have it, that he wishes for reform. He may be mistaken in his motives, but this is no excuse for attributing vile motives to him.

Nordau is not the only one who is puzzled by the many peculiarities of Ibsen’s plays. Like him, many English theatre-goers wonder why his best types and his leading characters, as a rule, are so void of nobility, fine feeling, and high principles; why he always places his scenes in small towns, and not among the romantically wild country and the picturesque peasants, as Björnsen and Jonas Lie have often done; why he represents the so-called respectable and official classes in so unfavourable a light; why his women seem to be morally and intellectually superior to his men.

In order to elucidate these questions and many other peculiarities in Ibsen’s plays and characters, as well as some of the reasons why a German critic should disapprove of Ibsen, it should be remembered that in Norway two cultures have met and struggled—the German and Scandinavian—but have not blended.

Of the Scandinavian nations, the Norwegians may be considered as the extreme type. While they differ from the Danes and Swedes considerably, they differ still more from the Germans. Their characteristics arise not only from race, but largely from surroundings and modes of life. The genuine Norwegian people have of old lived scattered over a vast area of country, separated by high fjelds and broad fjords, foaming torrents and dense woods, only sparingly communicating with each other, and still less with strangers, and hearing little of the outside world, they have grown into a silent, thinking, and deep-feeling nation. They have inherited from the old Viking times an unquenchable love of liberty, and all their institutions, their customs, their principles, have developed in freedom, and such virtues as they have and of which they are most proud, are the outcome of personal independence. Accustomed to personal danger on the snow-clad mountain-paths, in the vast forests, and in small open boats upon the stormy fjords, they have acquired an extraordinary degree of self-reliance. Unused to, and distrustful of, foreign ways, and seldom successful in foreign countries, they harbour an intense love of Norway and for anything Norwegian; and while they may conceitedly think that everything that is Norwegian is great and noble, they certainly endeavour to put a stamp of nobility and greatness on everything that is Norwegian. They are proud, generous, loyal, hospitable, and can never be persuaded that lowly circumstances or poverty could possibly be an excuse for an unroyal conduct.

Born and bred amid snow-capped mountains, deep valleys, perpendicular rocks, a jagged, stormy coast—the whole wearing an air of solemn and lonely grandeur—the Norwegians are a meditative and highly imaginative people. The stirring natural phenomena peculiar to the country cannot fail to stimulate their imagination. The snow-storms, the ice-avalanches, the light summer nights, the brilliant moonlight diffused over the abrupt mountains, the dark forests and the glittering fjords, the raging storms from the Atlantic, the flaming midnight winter skies, the sunsets which so wondrously illumine the whole coast-line—such scenes, such pictures, sink into their minds and quicken their emotions.

What wonder, then, if they are full of folk-lore and the supernatural has for them an irresistible charm? They are superstitious, and believe that their actions and lives are influenced by gnomes, fairies, and trolls. Old heathen ceremonies for the propitiation of the spirits are still in vogue. They are deeply moved by music and poetry, and have a strong predilection for all that is heroic and great.

It is not surprising that in German translations of Norwegian writings—for which Nordau blames Ibsen’s degeneracy—adjectives should have taken a new meaning; for in Norway they have been influenced by nature’s grandeur. When Norwegians say “great,” they mean great as the fjeld, great as the boundless ocean; when they say “silent,” they mean silent as the wood in the short summer night. Consequently, when a man, an action, a thing, is described to them, they are apt to measure it by the standard of nature’s extremes around them. They are always disappointed when they behold the wonders of civilization described to them as great and wonderful. They would call the ruins of the Coliseum mean, and think no more of the pyramids than of ant-hills. Their ideas of a great man could probably never be realized, and their wonder is considerable at finding the mighty lords of England so unlike demi-gods.

It was the Hanseatic League that brought this stern and haughty people into contact with German culture. This remarkable federation of enterprising German merchants discovered that profits could be made out of the rough products of Norway, and they founded a German colony in Bergen, which rose to considerable importance. German traders gradually settled in all the other important Norwegian centres, and the whole commercial life of Norway became more or less Germanized.

At the time Germany was far ahead of Norway in everything appertaining to industry, and was already then bent on doing business with foreign countries by offering them a mass of German manufactured goods of attractive appearance, but of little value, and not indispensable to a people like the Norwegians. Competition was already severe in Germany, money had acquired an immense importance, success in life was most easily attained by intense application to business, saving, and grinding. The German traders stood in the same relation to the Norwegians as that in which English traders stand to the native races whom they first approach for business purposes. The traders and agents who went as far as Norway—a long distance before the days of steamers and railways—were daring and reckless men, bent upon making money, just as the pioneers of British commerce were and are in Africa. What interested them was not the great and noble aspect of the Norwegian character, but the desire on the part of these people to buy gewgaws, and the facility with which they parted with their money and their goods.

Though Norway is a poor country, it yielded to the not over-ambitious Germans a satisfactory harvest, and a great number of them settled permanently in the Norwegian towns. They became sufficiently numerous and influential to impress a German stamp on Norwegian urban life, on the people who worked and lived with them; and these became Germanized to no small extent.

These middle-class Germans were no doubt excellent, respectable people in their way, but they had little in common with the Norwegian country folk. They were better educated, they had more worldly wisdom, their experience in their own cities had trained them to subject their emotional nature to their intellect. In order to push on to success in their German communities, where antagonistic and powerful magnates left but little scope for daring and straightforwardness, they had learned to value diplomacy and discretion.

They had no sympathies with the natives, whom they regarded as semi-barbarians, and all their intercourse with them was diplomatic and insincere, and their sole motive was profit. The honesty, the pride, the generosity of the Norwegian peasantry were well known to them, but they took advantage of these characteristics, which they regarded as expensive luxuries.

The cities however became the seats of the educational establishments, and the Norwegian youth who were intended for the professions came to the cities and mingled there with the German element. On the other hand, the sons of the citizens went into the country in professional capacities and created there a middle class strongly impregnated with German culture. In this manner a sharp line of demarcation arose between the upper and middle classes on the one hand and the peasantry on the other, the former being strongly influenced by German culture, the latter clinging tenaciously to the Norwegian.

It is no slur on the German character and German culture to say that it involved degeneration in no small degree. It partook of the drawbacks of our civilization, and what happened in Norway has happened in every country where modern civilization has come into contact with nations whose virtues and noble qualities have rested as much on ignorance and the absence of temptation as on inborn worth. Thanks to the historical development we have indicated, the Norwegian upper and middle classes, as well as the whole of the urban populations, developed characteristics which drew upon them the contempt of the peasants. Their eagerness for profit, their love of money, their indifference to the great, the noble, and the beautiful, their cringing attitude towards authorities and towards the wealthy, their sacrifice of public interests to private welfare, their susceptibility to the influence of foreign fashion, manners, and vices,—all this tended to lower the upper and middle classes in the eyes of the peasants.

When the phenomenon witnessed in all civilized countries—the impoverishment of the masses—made its appearance, public-spirited men began to inquire as to the causes. It was in the middle of this century, when a spirit of revolution and reform was abroad, that the yearning for a better state of things began to manifest itself. There were no aristocracy, no established Church, and no privileged class to blame for the unsatisfactory state of the country, and consequently the investigators turned their attention to the ethical condition of the people themselves. Comparison between the olden and the modern times was instituted. The discrepancy between the two classes became striking, and the corrupting influences were traced to the towns. A strong desire to revive and strengthen the old culture took possession of many men and women, who, though educated, had a keen sympathy with the peasants. To found the future development of Norway on the basis of the old Norwegian culture became the object of a new national party, including some of the best elements of the Norwegian nation. These enthusiasts found their expression in composers like Tjerulf, and in the writings of men like Björnstjerne Björnsen, Jonas Lie, and Ibsen.

The greatest mistake of these writers—the one that has entirely escaped Nordau—is their belief that a nation can realize its best aspirations by methods that have utterly failed in the celestial empire of China. The hope of preserving the grand feature of the old Norwegian culture by exclusiveness, by isolating Norway, and by offering a stubborn resistance to foreign influence, be it good or bad—in this they have set themselves an impossible task. A thorough national life and development produced by such artificial means would, even if attended by the highest degree of success, partake of a theatrical nature. The more it succeeded, the more it would attract foreigners, and features which in olden times sprang from the character of the people and from natural circumstances, would fall into the line of carnivals organized at the expense of the municipalities and of railways to Alpine summits.

These Norwegian enthusiasts have yet to learn that though foreign tourists, foreign literature, and foreign art place temptations in the way of their single-minded nation, there are in every country large numbers of people who fight for progress as sedulously as themselves, and whose co-operation would outweigh the dangers of European modernity. In the old culture, in the past life of nations, especially in nations like Norway, there are great virtues and noble features which may well serve as a goal. But to again render them a reality, to base them on lasting foundations, a people must pass through the fiery trials of modern temptations, and, instead of yielding plastically to outward circumstances, must shape their destiny through sheer strength of character. What Norway has of good and noble she should give to other nations, and freely accept their best from them. This is an exchange which, like mercy, blesses both giver and receiver.

Though the struggle against degeneration is, in Norway, hampered by the national prejudices of the leaders, it is still progressing. Ibsen’s mission in the fight is to ruthlessly expose the stagnant pools of corruption. He finds them in the cities and among the middle class, where the old German Philistine features have been most distinctly preserved. Many of his characters bear German names, and those who take the part of the traditional villain wear often the garb of that respectable, common-sense, matter-of-fact, self-absorbed German whom Nordau would exempt from any stigma of degeneration.

Thorvald Helmer, in _The Doll’s House_, has, or would have, the sympathies of millions, not in Germany alone, but in England and everywhere, of people whose emotional nature, whose love for the high and noble, has been compressed by that worldly wisdom which in our large crowded cities becomes prudence, and to obey which is often a duty—people who are not aware that it is not only possible, but even easy, to be both diplomatic and discreet in obedience to noble emotions and exalted aspirations, and that to root these out of our nature is degeneration.

Helmer, in his sleek reasonableness, is an excellent type of meanness, and his character is brought out in a consummately artistic way. It exasperates Nordau that this man, who comes so near his standard of sound-mindedness, should inspire in audiences all the world over, especially in the female element, a sense of aversion, apparently without any effort on the part of the author. Helmer has a keen eye for the main chance. His reputation and his position have his first consideration. He trembles at the idea of fighting the world without them. His love of his wife is the quintessence of selfishness. He loves her in the two only ways which Nordau thinks reasonable in a human being, as a companion, as a pleasant thing to toy with; and as the female of his race, at such periods when he, as the normal man of Nordau, is actuated by animal impulses—for example, under the influence of champagne. Of the pure love for a woman which in a man’s heart remains as a spring of living water, giving him a pang of joy each time his thoughts revert to her, and which casts a rosy tint of poetry over life, nay even over death—of such love Helmer is as incapable as Nordau’s normal man.

Nora yearns for the higher, nobler love, and her lack of experience in character-study has left her in doubt, though in hope, regarding her husband. The moment comes when she gains certitude; and when Helmer reveals himself in his Philistine hideousness, her spirit revolts.

Though of course exaggerated for the sake of dramatic effect, she is a good type of an intelligent and emotional Norwegian woman. Norwegian girls receive a great deal of instruction, and as they have no professions to prepare for, their education is more literary and artistic than that of the men. They read voraciously the Norwegian modern writers, and sympathize consequently more than the men with the extreme nationalists. They are often strongly possessed by the _Aand_—that indefinable yearning for all that is great and noble—in Norwegian culture already alluded to. They have a fair knowledge of foreign literature, and read a great many English novels. With their admiration for English pure love, for English home life, grafted on the grand aspirations which the new _Aand_ fosters, they may well appear uncanny and troll-like to the prosaic German.

We trust that the struggle between the Norwegian and the German cultures, of which we have endeavoured to give an idea, will make it easier for students of Ibsen to understand his characters. It is in _The Doll’s House_ where the two inimical cultures are most clearly personified, the old Norwegian culture being represented by the uncompromising, impulsive, and intense Nora, and the imported German culture by the pedantic, commonplace, and animal Helmer.

If our interpretation is right, it is impossible that Ibsen’s work could in any way indicate degeneration. It ought, on the contrary, to be evident that his pieces, rendering objective as they do the struggle for a higher and better life, based not on pedantic considerations of immediate and unworthy advantages, but on the noble impulses of a strong and healthy nation, are at once a summons to rise higher, and signals pointing the way.