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Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a Catiline, and in later life seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the Emperor and Galilean, in the Rome of the fourth century. But in Russia Tolstoi begins, and in Russia he ends.
The last of the romantics, he has been called a realist, a psychologist, and a symbolist, and he was certainly something of all these, half a century before the terms became battle-cries in literature, and came to designate literary schools. One critic has made him out to have been a sort of forerunner of Ibsen, while another calls him the most modern of classics.
Oddly enough, though the paradox is easily explained, we find much more similarity when we compare the Norwegian drama with that tragedy of Catiline which Ben Jonson published in 1611. Needless to state, Ibsen had never read the old English play; it would be safe to lay a wager that, when he died, Ibsen had never heard or seen the name of Ben Jonson.
"So much the worse for the community," was the comment of the Philosopher. "Man, as Ibsen has said, will always be at his greatest when he stands alone.
Ibsen has not always been successful in coming to his conclusions. In a sense A Doll's House might be called a failure: the case is one of the note of interrogation, and the audience is left in a mood of dissatisfaction, since, being deeply interested in the character of Nora, it is intensely curious to know what she will do next.
"If it were not for America, for the Mississippi Valley of America, one might say, Ibsen would have had a quiet grave, and Shaw might remain the Celtic buffoon. But the women of the Mississippi Valley have made a gospel out of them.... It is as interesting to hear them discuss the new dogmas on marriage as it is to see a child eat candy." "You seem to find it so with Isabelle."
In this decade of his impressionable and plastic youth Ibsen had taken part in the production of several score plays, some of them his own, others also original in his native tongue by Holberg and Öhlenschläger, and many more translated from Scribe, from Scribe's collaborators and from Scribe's contemporaries.
And with some reason he thinks so; for not seldom he takes up a foreign idea and tires of it before it is current elsewhere. More than one great writer of England had his first popular recognition in America. Even this season the Saturday Review is struggling with Ibsen, while Boston, having had that disease, has probably gone on to some other fad.
But the thesis of Ibsen is less academic, sounder, of more universal interest than Schnitzler's. There is no metaphysical hair-splitting in An Enemy of the People, nor sentimental talk about euphoria and going happily to death. Grim old Daddy Ibsen told us that people were being poisoned by impure spring water, and, as Alan Dale said, was the first man to write a drama around a drain-pipe.
Three-fourths of the action of The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of the past. Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical purposes of the everyday stage. But a situation is not an idea.
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