the others, and then, the progress of the scene being thus successive, the scene is made by some fresh device to attach itself to the scene that follows. In this way of jointing scene to scene, so that separation is impossible, the art of Ibsen is beyond all praise. For example, the forty-eighth scene, the third of the fourth act, in which Hedda forces her husband to share with her in the guilt of burning the manuscript, is a true masterpiece of dramatic workmanship. So much for Ibsen's method of constructing his separate scenes, a method that, although in many points very unlike the Shakespearian method, is profoundly skilful. Let us try in the next place to discover his method of so combining the separate scenes as to build up the entire drama. In this arrangement of scenes Ibsen has two distinct aims. In the first place, he wishes to bring before us in all possible fulness of detail the environment of circumstances in which Hedda finds herself placed. In the second place, he wishes to bring before us in all possible clearness of exposition the motives that control Hedda's mind, and that drive her to her course of action. Thus the entire play is developed, scene after scene, with a strange kind of mathematical precision, from combining a certain dramatic situation with a certain dramatic emotion. The scenes are arranged in such sequence as to exhibit, first, the circumstances that produce Hedda's state of feeling, and second, the state of feeling that produces her action. So the special art of Ibsen may be said to lie in exhibiting the action of his characters as developed by the force of a strong dramatic emotion from the circumstances of a well-defined dramatic situation. It is, I think, in constructing the details of his dramatic situation that the method of Ibsen is most unlike the method of all the other great dramatic poets. There is the point in which he is the most original and, to many of us, the most offensive. For, in order to produce his effect, he strips away from his dramatic situation all that is romantic and about all that is generous and noble in human life. The scenes, for example, are laid in that region of middle-class existence where life is hardest and meanest. The situation of his characters is full of sordid cares and of petty and miserable scheming. The environment in which they live is devoid of all beauty, and the incidents. and occupations of their lives are devoid of all the romantic interests, and of all magic dignity. Even the little Norwegian city in which these people live seems to have in itself and its surroundings no touch of natural beauty or of historical interest. Hedda's one servant, the good and faithful Bertha, is of middle age, ugly and countrified. George's old aunt, dear and good Miss Tasman, who has spent her sweet life in doing the largest possible amount of good on the smallest possible income, goes about with bonnet and parasol so cheap and gaudy as to excite derision. George himself is a foolish young man, who, to please his wife, has taken a house beyond his means, and who is very unhappy about his chances of making a living. Eilert, in spite of his talents, is a vicious young scamp, who has ruined himself by vulgar dissipation. Mrs. Elvsted is a weak and silly woman, who from being governess to the sheriff's children has married the old sheriff himself, and then fallen in love with his children's tutor. Brack is a lawyer who, clever enough in his bad way, finds his chief amusement in drinking-bouts and amorous intrigues. And Hedda herself, though born to a more exalted social rank, is selfish and tricky and insolent, incapable of an honest affection, with a mind chiefly set on having a new piano and a man-servant in livery. All, in fact, that goes to make the dramatic situation is given with a force of intense realism that sickens and depresses. It is all so commonplace and so vulgar as to make us wish at first to escape from the company in which the poet has placed us. We long for the breath of romance, for beautiful scenes, for exciting incidents, for noble and generous characters. But even while we are watching the scene before us we become aware, amid all the vulgar surroundings, of the play of strong passion and of the stealthy approach of most tragical fates. These commonplace incidents of daily life, this drinking of endless glasses of cold punch and this turning over the leaves of photograph albums, are shaping themselves under the guidance of a great poet's imagination into scenes of most tremendous dramatic interest. And as the play goes on we discover that in this poet's mind the meanness of the dramatic situation is his deliberate contrivance to bring upon us with more intense energy, as by force of grotesque contrast, the awful significance of the dramatic emotion. For, as we have seen, the purpose of Ibsen in dealing with his dramatic situation is only to reveal to us the origin and the nature and the special form of the dramatic emotion. He sets before us, for example, all the circumstances of Hedda's life, all this incredible fulness of vulgar, realistic details, for the purpose of forcing us to see why Hedda feels as she does feel, and why she does, each in turn, the various deeds that make up the tragedy. For, as I said in the beginning, Ibsen is by force of natural genius a lyrical poet. His main interest is always the interest that he feels in the emotions. The main striving of his mind is to express human emotion, and to trace, from phase to phase, the growth within the soul itself of those feelings by which his characters are controlled. And yet in spite of his unceasing effort to make the dramatic emotion clear, the main fault of Ibsen's method is the failure to bring out that emotion with sufficient clearness. This in reality is the fault. that English critics have found with his workmanship, the fault that will, I think, always keep him from becoming in the highest degree popular. It will be seen, by comparing his plays with one of Shakespeare's or one of Sophocles'. In all great dramatic poems, it is the simplicity of the dramatic emotion that produces the dramatic effect. We feel no doubt, for example, as to the feeling that makes Macbeth plot the death of Banquo. We are never uncertain as to the origin and nature of the emotion that leads Antigone to bury her brother. But Ibsen in this point also is a poet not of dramatic genius, but of lyrical. He studies the emotion rather in itself than in its consequences. He shuns all emotions that are simple and obvious. He seeks for states of emotion that are complex and difficult. Thus, in the very crises of his dramatic action, we find ourselves perplexed by problems of too great subtlety. We fail to see that each action of each character is the direct result of that character's emotion. The motive, instead of being plain and simple, is complex and far to seek. Consider, for example, the fortieth scene in Hedda Gabler, the scene in which Hedda gives her pistol to Eilert and sends him off to take his own life. What makes her do it? What is the emotion that leads her to desire the death of the man that she loves? It is a riddle set for us to work out as a problem in psychology. There is, in fact, no one emotion that expresses the action, no simple, sublime form that is acting. Her state of feeling is a complexity of many emotions. Her action is, as it were, the mechanical resultant of many forces. There was anger in her heart against this man because he had excited her girlish passions, and yet had failed to see that she loved him, and had not married her. There was, in the second place, jealousy because she saw him deeply loved by another woman. Then there was the sordid fear that Eilert, if he lived to publish his book, might receive the professorship that she wanted her husband to gain. And in the fourth place, there was the feeling of shame that the man whom she had loved would sink so low as to disgrace himself by drunkenness and debauchery and vile companionship. Such a blending of motives is, indeed, entirely human. It is full, in a certain way, of the deepest psychological and practical interest. But to substitute a complex for a single emotion is undramatic. It has the effect of troubling our minds, of setting us to work out and answer enigmas. It is the sacrifice of dramatic form to logical analysis. This, in the treatment of dramatic emotions, is the very point where Ibsen departs most widely from Shakespeare. It is Shakespeare that is right, Ibsen who is wrong. For, when Shakespeare had a problem of complex and subtile emotion to present, he put it in a sonnet, not in a tragedy. In dramatic art there is no cunning trick of emotional analysis that can equal the effect of direct and simple emotion. From what has been said of Ibsen's handling of the story, it is plain that his plan of construction must be widely different from that great artistic plan which Shakespeare has made familiar to us. The difference lies in the proportion of part to part along the five parts of the dramatic movement. All the parts are, indeed, present. But they are present in disproportionate masses. While one of these five parts is swollen to immense overgrowth, certain other parts are shrunk away almost to vanishing. Thus Ibsen's method of construction, as compared with Shakespeare's, is marked by absence of dramatic symmetry. And yet on this point also, as in so many others, the genius of Ibsen works with a strange kind of mathematical precision. He divides his dramatic movement into two about equal halves. Of these the first half contains the picture of the dramatic situation given, in the Hedda Gabler, in twenty-three scenes, comprising about one hundred and thirty-nine pages-while the second half contains the story of the dramatic emotions, and of its resulting action, given in twenty-eight scenes consisting of one hundred and thirty-three pages. Thus even while he shatters the symmetry of the old artistic proportion, he discovers a certain new form of symmetry for himself. The first part of the dramatic construction, the protasis or exposition has the purpose of making known to us the situation and the personal character of the story, as they are when the action of the play is begun. In Shakspeare's method the protasis occupies threefourths of the first act, about one-sixth of the entire poem. But Ibsen, as we have seen, extends the protasis of his work to lavish profusion of details. For example, in the play before us, by means of elaborate and life-like dialogues, he unfolds one by one all the essential events that have filled ten years in the lives of his seven characters, and along with so much personal history he paints for us the characters themselves. First there is the sketch of Bertha, the old servant-maid, and of old Miss Tasman, George's aunt. Then there is Mr. George himself, revealed in his goodness and stupidity. Then comes the careful delineation of Hedda in all the charm of her grateful and seductive womanhood. Then, as foil to Hedda, there is the timid and lovesick Mrs. Elvsted. Next a full-length portrait of the bustling, scheming lawyer, his honor Judge Brack; and finally, after most elaborate preparation of our minds to receive him, there is the picture of Eilert Lövborg, the friend and corrupter of Hedda's girlhood. In all this it is impossible to exaggerate the sharpness and the artistic charm of Ibsen's reading of character and situation. But it has to be done, according to his method, at immense length; and so the first part of the drama, instead of Shakespeare's one-sixth, fills more than one-half of the entire poem. The second part of the poem is, of course, the epitasis, the tightening of the plot. It fills, according to Shakespeare's method, about twofifths of the entire poem, running usually from the closing scenes of the first act to the middle of the third. Ibsen gives to this epitasis in his Hedda Gabler fourteen scenes, or fifty pages, about one-fifth of the whole play. It is, after so much conversation, full of movement and of passion. It begins, of course, with the great scene, opening the dramatic action-Scenes 24 to 28. Hedda finds herself alone with Eilert, and when Eilert reproaches her with having married George Tasman, she retorts that she had once loved Eilert himself well enough to give herself to him, but that he had been too foolish to see and use his good fortune. In the management of this scene Ibsen makes use of a dramatic trick, which has a very powerful effect. He lets the real scene be broken, at its points of most intense interest, by little parenthetical scenes of trivial importance. For while Hedda is talking with Eilert, time and time again George comes in offering punch and cigarettes. By this means, the suspense of the scene is kept up and the effect of the situation intensified almost to the point of nervous irritation. From this point the movement of the plot is rapid. Hedda, who knows Eilert's passion for drink, persuades him to take punch with her : and when he is half tipsy she brings about a quarrel between him and Mrs. Elvsted. Then she sends him off for a night of hard drinking with Judge Brack and her husband. In the early morning she gets from George the precious manuscript of Eilert's great book, which Eilert, in his drunken folly, has dropped upon the street, and which George had picked up intending to restore to him. A few moments after getting possession of the manuscript she learns from Judge Brack that Eilert has ended his night of debauch by going to see a disreputable woman and getting into a fight with the police. Hence, at the end of the thirty-seventh scene (the sixth scene of the third act), the epitasis comes to its ending. The plot is not completed. Hedda holds in her hands Eilert's precious manuscript, uncertain as yet what to do with it. The third part of the poem-the climax of the dramatic actionfills three scenes, the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth and fortieth (III. 7, 8, 9). It is of incomparable power, by far the master-scene of the poem. Eilert, still half drunk from the effect of the Judge's supper, finds him self in the company of the two women that have loved him. He has lost his manuscript: he is full of shame and remorse at his own relapse into drunkenness. He turns almost fiercely upon Mrs. Elvsted, and orders her to go back to her husband. The poor woman, heart-broken and desperate, leaves the man for whom she has abandoned husband and home. Then Eilert is alone with Hedda. He breaks down into unmanly despair at the loss of his manuscript and the ruin of his life. There is then a moment in which Hedda seems to pity him, and to be about to tell him that his manuscript is safe and his future redeemable. But, at this moment, the poor fool breaks out into a wild confession of his love for Mrs. Elvsted. With great dignity Hedda fetches one of her pistols, and shows Eilert that for a brave man there is only one way out of such a slough of shame and ruin. Eilert accepts the gift of the pistol and goes forth, leaving Hedda alone. |