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Updated: May 2, 2025
Fiske introduces into the middle-class Norwegian life of Ibsen's dramas? No plays can less well bear such inaccuracies, because they depend on their stage-setting to bring before our eyes their alien aspect, to make us feel an atmosphere with which we are wholly unfamiliar. The accessories are few, but of supreme importance; and it is inconceivable that a keenly intelligent actress like Mrs.
They were the objects of universal attention, and the King seemed never to have done smiling and bowing to the two most famous of his Norwegian subjects. The next night was Ibsen's fete, and he occupied, alone, the manager's box.
In Bjornson there is nothing of Ibsen's scornful despair, nothing of his anarchistic contempt, but his art is full of the warmth and color of a poetic soul, with no touch of the icy cynicism which freezes you in the other. I have felt the cold fascination of Ibsen, too, and I should be far from denying his mighty mastery, but he has never possessed me with the delight that Bjornson has.
But these theatric devices, in Dennery's hands or in Sardou's, would have existed for their own sake solely; but in Ibsen's, effective as they are, they have a deeper significance. He is able to avail himself of the complicated machinery of the "well-made play," to flash a piercing light into the darker recesses of human nature.
It demands in words which anticipate Ibsen's Doll's House, that a woman shall be herself and lead her own life. But "her own life" was for Mary Wollstonecraft a social life. The ideal is the perfect companionship of men and women, and the preparation of men and women, by an equal practice of modesty and chastity, and an equal advance in education, to be the parents of their children.
"I love London, too," Lily said, in her enthusiastic voice, "but I think modern plays are intensely interesting, especially Ibsen's." "They're cruel," the Canon said. "Yes, father, but not more cruel than some of the older pieces." "Such as ?" "I was thinking of 'The Bells. I saw Irving in it on Friday for the first time. You've seen it, of course, Mr. Dale?"
Not only in France, but in all other countries governed by the Latin tradition of solidarity, Ibsen's doctrine was certain to be unwelcome even if it might be wholesome. Outside of Scandinavia it is only in Germany that Ibsen has succeeded in winning acceptance as a popular dramatist, perhaps because it was there that the doctrine of individualism was most needed.
It is not merely that Ibsen's social dramas are all of them intensely Norwegian, peopled solely with natives and having the fiords ever present in the background. It is not merely that he has shrunk from all international contrasts, and from all cosmopolitanism; and here, no doubt, he has chosen the better part.
And it is in Agnes as the marvellous fourth act opens where her love for the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patience endures all the cruelties of her husband's fanaticism it is in Agnes that Ibsen's genius for the first time utters the clear, unembittered note of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a nursling of the World and Time.
Peer Gynt is no longer Ibsen's if the actors are dumb. The novel, in certain respects, fares still worse, but in other respects some degrees better. It is true that in the superficial literature written for the hour the demarcation line between dramatic and narrative works is often ignored.
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