 Section 7 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism. The first of the series of realistic prose plays is called Pillars of Society. But before describing this, a word must be said about a previous work which seems to have determined the form which the later series took. Between Pierre Gint and Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen had let fall an amusing comedy called The League of Youth, De Ungas Forbund, in which the imaginative egotist reappears farcically as an ambitious young lawyer-politician who, smarting under a snub from a local land donor and county magnate, relieves his feelings with such a passionate explosion of radical eloquence that he is cheered to the echo by the progressive party. Intoxicated with this success, he imagines himself a great leader of the people and a wielder of the mighty engine of democracy. He narrates to a friend a dream in which he saw kings swept helplessly over the surface of the earth by a mighty wind. He has hardly achieved this impromptu when he receives an invitation to dine with a local magnate, whose friends, to spare his feelings, have misled him as to the person aimed at in the new demagogue's speech. The invitation sets the egotist's imagination on the opposite tack. He is presently pouring forth his soul in the magnate's drawing room to the very friend to whom he related the great dream. My goal is this. In the course of time I shall get into Parliament, perhaps into the ministry, and marry happily into a rich and honorable family. I intend to reach it by my own exertions. I must and shall reach it without help from anyone. Meanwhile, I shall enjoy life here, drinking in beauty and sunshine. Here there are fine manners, life moves gracefully here. The very floors seem laid to be trodden only by lacquered shoes, the armchairs are deep, and the ladies sink exquisitely into them. Here the conversation goes lightly and elegantly, like a game at battle-door, and no blunders come plumping in to make an awkward silence. Here I feel for the first time what distinction means. Yes, we have indeed an aristocracy of culture, and to it I will belong. Don't you yourself feel the refining influence of the place? Et cetera, et cetera. For the rest, the play is an ingenious comedy of intrigue, clever enough in its mechanical construction to entitle the French to claim that Ibsen owes something to his technical education as a playwright in the School of Scribe, although it is hardly necessary to add that the difference between the League of Youth and the typical well-made play of Scribe is like the difference between a human being and a marionette. One or two episodes in the last two acts contain the germs of later plays, and it was the suitability of the realistic prose comedy form to these episodes that no doubt confirmed Ibsen in his choice of it. Therefore, the League of Youth would stand as the first of the realistic plays in any classification which referred to form alone. In a classification by content with which we are here alone concerned, it must stand in its chronological place as a farcical member of the group of heroic plays beginning with the pretenders and ending with Emperor and Galilean. End of Section 7. Section 8 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw. Section 8. Pillars of Society, then, is the first play in which Ibsen writes as one who has intellectually mastered his own didetic purpose and no longer needs to project himself into his characters. It is the history of one Karsten Bernig, a pillar of society, who in pursuance of the duty of maintaining the respectability of his father's famous firm of shipbuilders, to shatter which would be to shatter one of the ideals of commercial society and to bring abstract respectability into disrepute, has averted a disgraceful exposure by allowing another man to bear the discredit not only of a love affair in which he himself had been the sinner, but of a theft which was never committed at all. Having been merely alleged as an excuse for the firm being out of funds at a critical period, Bernig is an abject slave to the idealizing of a certain schoolmaster, Rorland, about responsibility, duty to society, good example, social influence, health of the community, and so on. When he falls in love with a married actress, he feels that no man has the right to shock the feelings of Rorland and the community for his own selfish gratification. However, a clandestine intrigue will shock nobody since nobody need know of it. He accordingly adopts this method of satisfying himself and preserving the moral tone of the community at the same time. Unluckily, the intrigue is all but discovered and Bernig has either to see the moral security of the community shaken to its foundations by the terrible scandal of his exposure or else to deny what he did and put it on another man. As the other man happens to be going to America, where he can easily conceal his imputed shame, Bernig's conscience tells him that it would be a little short of a crime against society to neglect such an opportunity, and he accordingly lies his way back into the good opinion of Rorland and the company at the immigrant's expense. There are three women in the play from whom the schoolmaster's ideals have no attractions. First, there is the actress's daughter who wants to get to America because she hears that people there are not good, and she is heartily tired of good people, since it's part of their goodness to look down on her because of her mother's disgrace. The schoolmaster, to whom she is engaged, consents to her for the same reason. The second has already sacrificed her happiness and wasted her life in conforming to Mr. Stead's ideal of womanliness, and she earnestly advises the younger woman not to commit that folly, but to break her engagement with the schoolmaster, and elope promptly with the man she loves. The third is a naturally free woman who has snapped her fingers at the current ideals all her life, and it is her presence that at last encourages the liar to break with the ideals by telling the truth about himself. The comic percentage of the piece is a useless hypochondriac whose function in life as described by himself is to, quote, hold up the banner of the ideal. This he does by snaring at everything and everybody for not resembling the heroic incidents and characters he reads about in novels and tales of adventure. But in his obvious pivishness and folly he is much less dangerous than the pious idealist, the earnest, inrespectable Rowland. The play concludes with Bernick's admission that the spirits of truth and freedom are the true pillars of society. A phrase which sounds so like an idealistic commonplace that it is necessary to add that truth in this passage does not mean the nursery convention of truth-telling, setarized by Ibsen himself in a later play, as well as by Labish and other comic dramatizes. It means the unflinching recognition of facts and the abandonment of the conspiracy to ignore such of them as do not bolster up the ideals. The idealist rule as to truth dictates the recognition only of those facts, idealistic masks of facts which have a respectable error in the mentioning of these on all occasions and at all hazards. Ibsen urges the recognition of all facts, but as to mentioning them, he wrote a whole play, as we shall see presently, to show that you must do that at your own peril, and that a truth-teller who cannot hold his tongue on occasion may do as much mischief as a whole university full of trained liars. The word freedom, I need hardly say, means freedom from slavery to the Rorland ideals. End of Section 8. Recording by Steve Wolf, Kirkland, Washington. Section 9 of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw. Section 9. A Doll's House. Unfortunately, pillars of society as a propagandist play is disabled by the circumstance that the hero, being a fraudulent hypocrite in the ordinary police court sense of the phrase, is not accepted as a typical pillar of society by the class which he represents. Accordingly, Ibsen took care next time to make his idealist irreproachable from the standpoint of the ordinary idealist morality. In the famous Doll's House, the pillar of society who owns the Doll is a model husband, father, and citizen. In his little household, with the three darling children and the affectionate little wife, all on the most loving terms with one another, we have the sweet home, the womanly woman, the happy family life of the idealist's dream. Miss Nora Helmer is happy in the belief that she has attained a valid realization of all these illusions, that she is an ideal wife and mother, and that Helmer is an ideal husband who would, if the necessity arose, give his life to save a reputation. A few simply contrived incidents disabuse her effectually on all these points. One of the earliest acts of devotion to her husband has been the secret raising of a sum of money to enable him to make a tour which was necessary to restore his health. As he would have broken down sooner than go into debt, she has had to persuade him that the money was a gift from her father. It was really obtained from a moneylender who refused to make her the loan unless she induced her father to endorse the promissory note. This being impossible, as her father was dying at the time, she took the shortest way out of the difficulty by writing the name herself to the entire satisfaction of the moneylender, who, though not at all duped, knows that forged bills are often the surest to be paid. Then she slaves in secret at scriveness work until she has nearly paid off the debt. At this point Helmer is made manager of the bank in which she is employed, and the moneylender, wishing to obtain a post there, uses the forged bill to force Nora to exert her influence with Helmer on his behalf. Could she, having a hearty contempt for the man, cannot be persuaded by him that there was any harm in putting her father's name on the bill, and ridicules the suggestion that the law would not recognize that she was right under the circumstances? It is her husband's own contemptuous denunciation of a forgery formerly committed by the moneylender himself that destroys her self-satisfaction and opens her eyes to her ignorance of the serious business of the world to which her husband belongs. The world outside the home he shares with her. When he goes on to tell her that commercial dishonesty is generally to be traced to the influence of bad mothers, she begins to perceive that the happy way in which she plays with the children and the care she takes to dress them nicely are not sufficient to constitute her a fit person to train them. In order to redeem the forged bill, she resolves to borrow the balance due upon it from a friend of the family. She has learned to coax her husband into giving her what she asks by appealing to his affection for her, that is, by playing all the sorts of pretty tricks until he is wedled into an amorous humour. This plan she has adopted without thinking about it, instinctively taking the line of least resistance with him, and now she naturally takes the same line with her husband's friend. An unexpected declaration of love from him is the result. When he did once explains to her the real nature of the domestic influence she has been so proud of. All her illusions about herself are now shattered. She sees herself as an ignorant and silly woman, a dangerous mother, and a wife kept for her husband's pleasure merely. But she only clings the harder to her illusion about him. He is the ideal husband who would make any sacrifice to rescue her from ruin. She resolves to kill herself rather than allow him to destroy his own career by taking the forgery on himself to save her reputation. The final disillusion comes when he, instead of at once proposing to pursue this ideal line of conduct when he hears of the forgery, naturally enough flies into a vulgar rage and heaps invective on her for disgracing him. Then she sees that their whole family life has been a fiction, their home a mere door's house in which they have been playing at ideal husband and father, wife and mother. So she leaves him then and there in order to find out the reality of things for herself and to gain some position not fundamentally false, refusing to see her children again until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to live with him until she and he become capable of a more honorable relation to one another than that in which they have hitherto stood. He presents the course most agreeable to him, that of her staying at home and avoiding a scandal, as her duty to her husband, to her children, and to her religion. But the magic of these disguises is gone, and at last even he understands what has really happened and sits down alone to wonder whether that more honorable relation can ever come to pass between them. Section 10 of the Quintessence of Ipsinism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jack Daniel San Francisco, California. www.voiceofjack.com The Quintessence of Ipsinism by George Bernard Shaw. Section 10. Ghosts. In his next play, Ipsin returned to the chart with such an uncompromising and outspoken attack on marriage as a useless sacrifice of human beings to an ideal that his meaning was obscured by its very obviousness. Ghosts, as it is called, is the story of a woman who is faithfully acted as a model wife and mother. Sacrificing herself at every point with selfless thoroughness, her husband is a man with a huge capacity and appetite for sensuous enjoyment. Society, prescribing ideal duties and not enjoyment for him, drives him to enjoy himself in underhand and illicit ways. When he marries his model wife, her devotion to duty only makes life harder for him. And he at last takes refuge in the caresses of an undutiful but pleasure-loving housemaid and leaves his wife to satisfy her conscience by managing his business affairs whilst he satisfies his cravings, as best he can, by reading novels, drinking, and flirting, as aforesaid, with the servants. At this point, even those who are most indignant with Nora Helmer for walking out of the doll's house must admit that Mrs. Alving would be justified in walking out of her house. But Ipsen is determined to show you what comes of the scrupulous line of conduct you are so angry with Nora for not pursuing. Mrs. Alving feels that her place is by her husband for better, for worse, and by her child. Now, the ideal of wifely and womanly duty which demands this from her also demands that she should regard herself as an outraged wife and her husband as a scoundrel. The family ideal again requires that she should suffer in silence and, for her son's sake, never shatter his faith in the purity of home life by letting him know the truth about his father. It is her duty to conceal that truth from the world and from him. In this, she only falters for one moment. Her marriage has not been a love match. She has, in pursuance of her duty as a daughter, contracted it for the sake of her family, although her heart inclined to a highly respectable clergyman, a professor of her own idealism, named Manders. In the humiliation of her first discovery of her husband's infidelity, she leaves the house and takes refuge with Manders. But he at once leads her back to the path of duty from which she does not again swerve. With the utmost devotion, she now carries out a tremendous scheme of lying and imposture. She so manages her husband's affairs and so shields his good name that everybody believes him to be a public-spirited citizen of the strictest conformity to current ideals of respectability and family life. She sits up nights listening to his lewd and silly conversation and even drinking with him to keep him from going into the streets and betraying what she considers his vices. She provides for the servant he has seduced and brings up his illegitimate daughter as a maid in her own household and as a crowning sacrifice. She sends her son away to Paris to be educated there, knowing that if he stays at home, the shattering of his ideals must come sooner or later. Her work is crowned with success. She gains the esteem of her old love, the clergyman, who was never tired of holding up her household as a beautiful realization of the Christian ideal of marriage. Her own martyrdom is brought to an end at last by the death of her husband in the odor of a most sanctified reputation, leaving her free to recall her son from Paris and enjoy his society and his love and gratitude in the flower of his early manhood. But when he comes home, the facts refuse as obstinately as ever to correspond to her ideals. Oswald, the son, has inherited his father's love of enjoyment. And when, in dull, rainy weather, he returns from Paris to the solemn, strictly ordered house where virtue and duty have had their temple for so many years, his mother sees him first show the unmistakable signs of boredom with which she is so miserably familiar from of old, then sit after dinner, killing time over the bottle, and finally the climax of anguish. Begin to flirt with the maid who, as his mother alone knows, is his own father's daughter. But there is this worldwide difference in her insight to the cases of the father and the son. She did not love the father. She loves the son with the intensity of a heart-starved woman who has nothing else left to love, instead of recoiling from him with pious disgust and phariseical consciousness of moral superiority. She sees at once that he has a right to be happy in his own way and that she has no right to force him to be dutiful and wretched in hers. She sees, too, her injustice to the unfortunate father and the iniquity of the monstrous fabric of lies and false appearances which she has wasted her life in manufacturing. She resolves that the son's life, at least, shall not be sacrificed to joyless and unnatural ideals. But she soon finds that the work of the ideals is not to be undone quite so easily. In driving the father to steal his pleasures in secrecy and squalor, they had brought upon him the diseases bred by such conditions. And her son now tells her that those diseases have left their mark on him and that he carries poison in his pocket against the time foretold to him by a Parisian surgeon when he shall be struck down with softening of the brain. In desperation, she turns to the task of rescuing him from this horrible apprehension by making his life happy. The house shall be made as bright as Paris for him. He shall have as much champagne as he wishes until he is no longer driven to that dangerous resource by the dullness of his life with her. If he loves the girl, he shall marry her if she were fifty times his half-sister. But the half-sister, on learning the state of his health, leaves the house. For she too is her father's daughter and is not going to sacrifice her life in devotion to an invalid. When the mother and son are left alone in their dreary home, with the rain still falling outside, all she can do for him is to promise that if his doom overtakes him before he can poison himself, she will make a final sacrifice of her natural feelings by performing that dreadful duty, the first of all her duties that has any real basis. Then the weather clears up at last and the son, which the young man has so longed to see, appears. He asks her to give it to him to play with and a glance at him shows her that the ideals have claimed their victim and that the time has come for her to save him from a real horror by sending him from her out of the world just as he saved him from an imaginary one years before by sending him out of Norway. This last scene of ghosts is so appallingly tragic that the emotions it excites prevent the meaning of the play from being seized and discussed like that of a doll's house. In England, nobody, as far as I know, seems to have perceived that Ghost is to a doll's house what Mr. Walter Bissent intended his own sequel to that play to be. Footnote. An astonishing production, which will be found in the English Illustrated magazine for January, 1890. Mr. Bissent makes the moneylender as a reformed man and a pattern of all the virtues repeat his old tactics by holding a forged bill in terorum over Nora's grown-up daughter, who is engaged to his son. The bill has been forged by her brother, who has inherited a tendency to this sort of offence from his mother. Helmer having taken to drink after the departure of his wife and forfeited his social position, the moneylender tells the girl that if she persists in disgracing him by marrying his son, he will send her brother to jail. She evades the dilemma by drowning herself. An exquisite absurdity is given to this Judas Free by the moral, which is that if Nora had never run away from her husband, her daughter would never have drowned herself. And also by the writer's naive unconsciousness of the fact that he has represented the moneylender as doing over again what he did in the play, with the difference that, having become eminently respectable, he has also become a remorseless scoundrel. Ipsen shows him as a good-natured fellow at bottom. End footnote. Mr. Byzant attempted to show what might come of Nora's repudiation of that idealism of which he is one of the most popular professors. But the effect made on Mr. Byzant by a doll's house was very faint compared to that produced on the English critics by the first performance of ghosts in this country. In the earlier part of this essay, I have shown that since Mrs. Alving's early conceptions of duty are as valid to ordinary critics as to Pastor Manders, who must appear to them as an admirable man, endowed with Helmer's good sense without Helmer's selfishness, a pretty general disapprovement of the moral of the play was inevitable. Fortunately, the newspaper press went to such bedlamite lengths on this occasion that Mr. William Archer, the well-known dramatic critic and translator of Ipsen, was able to put the whole body of hostile criticism out of court by simply quoting its excesses in an article entitled Ghosts and Giverings, which appeared in the Paul-Mal Gazette of the 8th of April, 1891. Mr. Archer's extracts, which he offers as a nucleus for a dictionary of abuse modeled upon the Wagner-Schimpf lexicon, are worth reprinting here as samples of contemporary idealist criticism of the drama. Descriptions of the play Ipsen's positively abominable play entitled Ghosts, this disgusting representation, reprobation due to such as aim at infecting the modern theater with poison after desperately inoculating themselves and others, an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly, a laser house with all its doors and windows open, candid foulness, cuts of view turned bestial and cynical, offensive cynicism, Ipsen's melancholy and malodorous world, absolutely loathsome and fetid, gross, almost putrid and quorum, literary carrion, crapless stuff, novel and perilous nuisance, Daily Telegraph leading article, this mass of vulgarity, egotism, coarseness and absurdity, Daily Telegraph criticism, unutterably offensive, prosecution under Lord Campbell's act, abominable peace, scandalous, standard, naked loathsomeness, most dismal and repulsive production, Daily News, revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous, characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent, Daily Chronicle, a repulsive and degrading work, Queen, morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome and disgusting story, a piece to bring this stage into disrepute and dishonor with every right-thinking man and woman, Lloyds, merely dull dirt long drawn out, Hawk, morbid horrors of the hideous tale, ponders dullness of the didactic talk, if any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy, sporting and dramatic news. Just a wicked nightmare, the gentle woman, lugubrious diagnosis of sordid impropriety, characters are prigs, pedants and profligates, morbid caricatures, monderings of the nookshot in Norwegians, it is no more of a play than an average gaiety burlesque, W. Sann Lager in black and white, most loathsome of all Ipsen's plays, garbage and awful, truth, Ipsen's putrid play called Ghosts, so loathsome an enterprise, academy, as foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards of an English theater, dull and disgusting, nastiness and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel, era, noisome corruption, stage, descriptions of Ipsen, an egotist and a bungler, daily telegraph, a crazy fanatic, a crazy cranky being, not only consistently dirty but deplorably dull, truth, the Norwegian pessimist in petto, sick, W. Sann Lager in black and white, ugly, nasty, discordant and downright dull, a gloomy sort of ghoul bent on groping for hours by night and blinking like a stupid old owl when the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into his wrinkled eyes, gentle woman, a teacher of the aestheticism of the lock hospital, Saturday review, descriptions of Ipsen's admirers, lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety who are eager to gratify their illicit tastes under the pretense of art, evening standard. 97% of the people who go to see ghosts are nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste in exact proportion to their nastiness, sporting and dramatic news. The sexless, the unwomently woman, the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats, educated and muck ferreting dogs, effeminate men and male women. They all of them, men and women alike, know that they are doing not only a nasty but an illegal thing. The Lord Chamberlain left them alone to wallow in ghosts. Outside a silly clique, there's not the slightest interest in the Scandinavian humbug for his works, a wave of human folly. Section 11 of the Quintessence of Ipsenism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, reading by Asterix. The Quintessence of Ipsenism by George Bernard Shaw. Section 11. The Plays. An Enemy of the People. After this, the reader will understand the temper in which Ipsen set about his next play An Enemy of the People, in which, having done sufficient execution among the ordinary social, domestic and puritanic ideals, he puts his finger for a moment on political ideals. The play deals with a local majority of middle-class people who are pecuniarily interested in concealing the fact that the famous baths which attract visitors to their town and customers to their shops and hotels are contaminated by sewage. When an honest doctor insists on exposing this danger, the townspeople immediately disguise themselves ideally, feeling the disadvantage of appearing in their true character as a conspiracy of interested rogues against an honest man. They pose as society, as the people, as democracy, as the solid liberal majority and other imposing abstractions. The doctor, in attacking them, of course, being thereby made an enemy of the people, a danger to society, a traitor to democracy, an apostate from the great liberal party, and so on. Only those who take an active part in politics can appreciate the grim fun of the situation, which, though it has an intensely local Norwegian air, will be at once recognized as typical in England, not perhaps by the professional literary critics who are for the most part fenillon, as far as political life is concerned, but certainly by everyone who has got as far as a seat on the committee of the most obscure caucus. As an enemy of the people contains one or two references to democracy which are anything but respectful, it is necessary to define Ibsen's criticism of it with precision. Democracy is really only an arrangement by which the whole people are given a certain share in the control of the government. It has never been proved that this is ideally the best arrangement. It became necessary because the people willed to have it, and it has been made effective only to the very limited extent short of which the dissatisfaction of the majority would have taken the form of actual violence. Now, when men had to submit to kings, they consoled themselves by making it an article of faith that the king was always right. Idealized him as a pope, in fact. In the same way, we, who have to submit to majorities, set up Voltaire's pope, M. Thulemonde, and make it blasphemy against democracy to deny that the majority is always right, although that, as Ibsen says, is a lie. It is a scientific fact that the majority, however eager it may be for the reform of old abuses, is always wrong in its opinion of new developments, or rather, is always unfit for them, for it can hardly be said to be wrong in opposing developments for which it is not yet fit. The pioneer is a tiny majority of the force he heads, and so, though it is easy to be in a minority and yet be wrong, it is absolutely impossible to be in the majority and yet be right as to the newest social prospects. We should never progress at all if it were possible for each of us to stand still on democratic principles until we saw wither all the rest were moving, as our statesmen declare themselves bound to do when they are called upon to lead. Whatever clatter we may make for a time with our filing through feudal surf-collars and kicking off rusty capitalistic fetters, we shall never march a step forward except at the heels of the strongest man, he who is able to stand alone and to turn his back on the damned compact liberal majority, all of which is no disparagement of adult suffrage, payment of members' annual parliaments, and so on, but simply a wholesome reduction of them to their real place in the social economy as pure machinery, machinery which has absolutely no principles except the principles of mechanics and no motive power in itself whatsoever. The idealization of public organizations is as dangerous as that of kings or priests. We need to be reminded that, though there is in the world a vast number of buildings in which a certain ritual is conducted before crowds called congregations by a functionary called a priest who is subject to a central council controlling all such functionaries on a few points, there is not, therefore, any such thing in reality as the ideal Catholic Church nor ever was, nor ever will be. There may, too, be a highly elaborate organization of public affairs, but there is no such thing as the ideal state. All abstractions invested with collective consciousness or collective authority set above the individual and exacting duty from him on pretence of acting or thinking with greater validity than he are man-eating idols read with human sacrifices. This position must not be confounded with anarchism or the idealization of the repudiation of governments. Ibsen does not refuse to pay the tax collector but may be supposed to regard him not as an emissary of something that does not exist and never did, called the state, but simply as the man sent round by the committee of citizens mostly fools as far as the Third Empire is concerned to collect the money for the police or the paving and lighting of the streets. End of Section 11 Section 12 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Asterix The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Section 12 The Wild Duck After an enemy of the people, Ibsen, as I have said, left the vulgar ideals for dead and set about the exposure of those of the choicest spirits beginning with the incorrigible idealists who had idealized his very self and were becoming known as Ibsenites. His first move in this direction was such a tragicomic slaughtering of sham Ibsenism that his astonished victims plaintively declared that the Wild Duck, as the new play was called, was a satire on his former works, whilst the pious, whom he had disappointed so severely by his interpretation of brand, began to think that he had come back repentant to the fold. The household to which we are introduced in the Wild Duck is not, like Mrs. Alving's, a handsome one made miserable by superstitious illusions, but a shabby one made happy by romantic illusions. The only member of it who sees it as it really is, is the wife, a good-natured Philistine who desires nothing better. The husband, a vain, petted, spoiled dawdler, believes that he is a delicate and high-sold man, devoting his life to redeeming his old father's name from the disgrace brought on it by an imprisonment for breach of the forest laws. This redemption he proposes to effect by making himself famous as a great inventor some day he has the necessary inspiration. Their daughter, a girl in her teens, believes intensely in her father and in the promised invention. The disgraced grandfather cheers himself by drink whenever he can get it, but his chief resource is a wonderful garret full of rabbits and pigeons. The old man has procured a number of second-hand Christmas trees and with these he has turned the garret into a sort of toy forest in which he can play at bear-hunting, which was one of the sports of his youth and prosperity. The weapons employed in the hunting expeditions are a gun which will not go off, and a pistol which occasionally brings down a rabbit or a pigeon. A crowning touch is given to the illusion by a wild duck, which, however, must not be shot, as it is the special property of the girl who reads and dreams whilst the woman cooks and washes, besides carrying on the photographic work, which is supposed to be the business of her husband. She does not appreciate his highly strong sensitiveness of character, which is constantly suffering agonizing jars from her vulgarity, but then she does not appreciate that other fact that he is a lazy and idle imposter. Downstairs there is a disgraceful clergyman named Malvik, a hopeless drunkard, but even he respects himself and is tolerated because of a special illusion invented for him by another lodger, a doctor, the now famous Dr. Relling, upon whom the lesson of the household above has not been thrown away. Malvik, says the doctor, must break out into drinking-fits because he is demonic, an interesting explanation which completely relieves the reverent gentleman from the imputation of vulgar tippling. Into this domestic circle there comes a new lodger, an idealist of the most advanced type. He greedily swallows the demonic theory of the clergyman's drunkenness and enthusiastically accepts the photographer as the highest-sold hero he supposes himself to be, but he is troubled because the relations of the man and his wife do not constitute an ideal marriage. He happens to know that the woman before her marriage was the cast-off mistress of his own father, and because she has not told her husband this, he conceives her life as founded on a lie, like that of Bernick in Pillars of Society. He accordingly sets himself to work out the woman's salvation for her, and establish, ideally, frank relations between the pair by simply blurting out the truth and then asking them, with fatuous self-satisfaction, whether they do not feel much the better for it. This wanton piece of mischief has more serious results than a mere domestic scene. The husband is too weak to act on his bluster about outraged honour and the impossibility of his ever living with his wife again, and the woman is merely annoyed with the idealist for telling on her. But the girl takes the matter to heart and shoots herself. The doubt cast on her parentage with her father's theatrical repudiation of her, destroy her ideal place in the home and make her a source of discord there. So she sacrifices herself, thereby carrying out the teaching of the idealist mischief-maker who has talked a good deal to her about the duty and beauty of self-sacrifice without foreseeing that he might be taken in mortal earnest. The busybody thus finds that people cannot be freed from their failings from without. They must free themselves. When Nora is strong enough to live out of the doll's house she will go out of it of her own accord if the door stands open. But if before that period you take her by the scruff of the neck and thrust her out she will only take refuge in the next establishment of the kind that offers to receive her. Woman has thus two enemies to deal with. The old-fashioned one who wants to keep the door locked and the new-fashioned one who wants to thrust her into the street before she is ready to go. In the cognate case of a hypocrite and liar like Bernick exposing him is a mere police-measure. He is nonetheless a liar and hypocrite when you have exposed him. If you want to make a sincere and truthful man of him all that you can do is to remove what you can of the external obstacles to his exposing himself and then wait for the operation of his internal impulse to confess. If he has no such impulse then you must put up with him as he is. It is useless to make claims on him which he is not yet prepared to meet. Whether, like Brand, we make such claims because to refrain would be to compromise with evil or, like Gregor's Vela, because we think their moral beauty must recommend them at sight to everyone, we shall alike incur relings in patient assurance that life would be quite terrible if we could only get rid of the confounded dunes that keep on pestering us in our poverty with the claims of the ideal. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Wendy Almeda. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Section 13. Rosmer's Home. Ibsen did not in the wild duck exhaust the subject of the danger of forming ideals for other people and interfering in their lives with the view to enabling them to realize those ideals. Cases far more typical than that of the meddlesome lodger are those of the priest who regards the ennobling of mankind as a sort of trade process of which his cloth gives him a monopoly and the clever woman who pictures a noble career for the man she loves and devotes herself to helping him to achieve it. In Rosmer's Home, the play with which Ibsen followed up the wild duck, there is an unpractical country parson, a gentleman of ancient stock whose family has been for many years a center of social influence. The tradition of that influence reinforces his priestly tendency to regard the ennoblement of the world as an external operation to be performed by himself, and the need of such ennoblement is very evident to him for his nature is a fine one. He looks at the world with some dim pre-vision of the Third Empire. He is married to a woman of passionately affectionate nature who is very fond of him but does not regard him as a regenerator of the human race. Indeed she does not share any of his dreams and only acts as an extinguisher on the sacred fire of his idealism. He, she, her brother Kroll the headmaster, Kroll's wife, and their set form a select circle of the best people in the place, comfortably orbited in the social system and quite planetary and ascertained position and unimpeachable respectability. Into the orbit comes presently a wandering star, one Rebecca Gamvik, an unpropertyed orphan who has been allowed to read advanced books and is a free thinker and a radical, all things that disqualify a poor woman for admission to the Rosmer world. However, one must live somewhere, and as the Rosmer world is the only one in which an ambitious and cultivated woman can find powerful allies and educated companions, Rebecca, being both ambitious and cultivated, makes herself agreeable to the Rosmer circle with such success that the affectionate and impulsive but unintelligent Mrs. Rosmer becomes wildly fond of her and is not content until she has persuaded her to come and live with them. Rebecca, then a mere adventurous fighting for a foothold in polite society, which has hitherto shown itself highly indignant at her thrusting herself in where nobody has thought of providing room for her, accepts the offer all the more readily because she has taken the measure of Pars and Rosmer and formed the idea of playing upon his aspirations and making herself a leader in politics and society by using him as a figurehead. But now two difficulties arise. First, there is Mrs. Rosmer's extinguishing effect on her husband, an effect which convinces Rebecca that nothing can be done with him whilst his wife is in the way. Second, a contingency quite unallowed for in her provident calculations, she finds herself passionately enamored of him. The poor Pars and two falls in love with her, but he does not know it. He turns to the woman who understands him like a sunflower to the sun and makes her his real friend and companion. The wife feels this soon enough and he, quite unconscious of it, begins to think that her mind must be affected since she has become so intensely miserable and hysterical about nothing, nothing that he can see. The truth is that she has come under the curse of the ideal too. She sees herself standing a useless obstacle between her husband and the woman he really loves, the woman who can help him to a glorious career. She cannot even be the mother in the household, for she is childless. Then comes Rebecca, fortified with a finely reasoned theory that Rosmer's future is staked against his wife's life and says that it is better for all their sakes that she should quit Rosmer's home. She even hints that she must go at once if a grave scandal is to be avoided. Mrs. Rosmer, regarding a scandal in Rosmer's home as the most terrible thing that can happen and seeing that it could be averted by the marriage of Rebecca and Rosmer if she were out of the way, writes a letter secretly to Rosmer's bitterest enemy, the editor of the local radical paper, a man who has forfeited his moral reputation by an intrigue which Rosmer has piteously denounced. In this letter she implores him not to believe or publish any stories that he may hear about Rosmer to the effect that he is in any way to blame for anything that may happen to her. Then she sets Rosmer free to marry Rebecca and to realize his ideals by going out into the garden and throwing herself into the mill stream that runs there. Now follows a period of quiet mourning at Rosmer's home. Everybody except Rosmer suspects that Mrs. Rosmer was not mad and guesses why she committed suicide. Only it would not do to compromise the aristocratic party by treating Rosmer as the radical editor was treated. So the neighbors shut their eyes and condole with the bereaved clergyman. And the radical editor holds his tongue because radicalism is getting respectable and he hopes with Rebecca's help to get Rosmer over to his side presently. Meanwhile the unexpected has again happened to Rebecca. Her passion is worn out. But in the long days of mourning she has found the higher love and it is now for Rosmer's own sake that she urges him to become a man of action and brood no more over the dead. When his friends start a conservative paper and ask him to become editor she induces him to reply by declaring himself a radical and free thinker. To his utter amazement the result is not an animated discussion of his views but just such an attack on his home life and private conduct as he had formerly made on those of the radical editor. His friends tell him plainly that the compact of silence is broken by his defection and that there will be no mercy for the traitor to the party. Even the radical editor not only refuses to publish the fact that his new ally is a free thinker which would destroy all his social weight as a radical recruit but brings up the dead woman's letter as a proof that the attack is sufficiently well founded to make it unwise to go too far. Rosmer, who at first had been simply shocked by the men whom he had always honored as gentlemen should descend to such hideous calumny now sees that he really did love Rebecca and is indeed guilty of his wife's death. His first impulse is to shake off the specter of the dead woman by marrying Rebecca but she, knowing that the guilt is hers puts that temptation behind her and refuses. Then as he thinks it all over his dream of ennobling the world slips away from him such work can only be done by a man conscious of his own innocence. To save him from despair Rebecca makes a great sacrifice she gives him back his innocence by confessing how she drove his wife to kill herself and as the confession is made in the presence of Kroll she ascribes the whole plot to her ambition and says not a word of her passion. Rosmer, confounded as he realizes what helpless puppets they have all been in the hands of this clever woman for the moment misses the point that unscrupulous ambition though it explains her crime does not account for her confession. He turns his back on her and leaves the house with Kroll. She quietly packs up her trunk and is about to vanish from Rosmer's home without another word when he comes back alone to ask why she confessed. She tells him why offering him her self-sacrifice as a proof that his power of ennobling others was no vain dream since it is his companionship that has changed her from this selfish adventurous she was to the devoted woman she has just proved herself to be. But he has lost his faith in himself and cannot believe her. The proof is too subtle, too artful. He cannot forget that she duped him by flattering this very weakness of his before. Besides, he knows now that it is not true that people are not ennobled from without. She has no more to say for she can think of no further proof. But he has thought of an unanswerable one. Dare she make all doubt impossible by doing for his sake what the wife did? She asks what would happen if she had the heart and the will to do it. Then, he replies, I should have to believe in you. I should recover my faith in my mission, faith in my power to ennoble human souls, faith in the human soul's power to attain nobility. I shall have your faith again, she answers. At this pass the inner truth of the situation comes out and the thin veil of a demand for proof with its monstrous sequel of asking the woman to kill herself in order to restore the man's good opinion of himself falls away. What has really seized Rosmer is the old fatal ideal of expiation by sacrifice. He sees that when Rebecca goes into the mill stream he must go too and he speaks his real mind in the words there is no judge over us, therefore we must do justice upon ourselves. But the woman's soul is free of this to the end for when she says I am under the power of the Rosmer's home view of life now, what I have sinned, it is fit, I should expiate we feel in that speech a protest against the Rosmer's home view of life, the view that denied her right to live and be happy from the first and now at the end, even in denying its God, exacts her life as a vain blood offering for its own blindness. The woman has the higher light. She goes to her death out of fellowship with the man who is driven thither by the superstition which has destroyed his will. The story ends with his taking her solemnly as his wife and casting himself with her into the mill stream. It is unnecessary to repeat here what is said on page 36 as to the vital part played in this drama by the evolution of the lower into the higher love. Pierre Gint during the prophetic episode in his career shocks the dancing girl in Nitra into a remonstrance by comparing himself to a cat. He replies with his wisest air that from the standpoint of love there is perhaps not so much difference between a tomcat and a prophet as she may imagine. The number of critics who have entirely missed the point of Rebecca's transfiguration seems to indicate that the majority of men, even among critics of dramatic poetry, have not got beyond Pierre Gint's opinion in this matter. No doubt they would not endorse it as a definitely stated proposition aware as they are that there is a poetic convention to the contrary. But if they fail to recognize the only possible alternative proposition when it is not only stated in so many words by Rebecca West, but when without it her conduct dramatically contradicts her character when they even complain of the contradiction as a blemish on the play. I am afraid there can be no further doubt that the extreme perplexity into which the first performance of Rosmer's home in England plunged the press was due entirely to the prevalence of Pierre Gint's view of love among the dramatic critics. End of section 13 Section 14 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Kay Hand The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Section 14, The Place, The Lady from the Sea Ibsen's next play, though it deals with the old theme, does not insist on the power of ideals to kill as the two previous plays do. It rather deals with the origin of ideals and unhappiness in dissatisfaction with the real. The subject of The Lady from the Sea is the most poetic, fancy imaginable. A young woman, brought up on the sea coast, marries a respectable doctor, a widower, who idolizes her and places her in his household with nothing to do but dream and be made much of by everybody. Even the housekeeping is done by her stepdaughter. She has no responsibility, no care, and no trouble. In other words, she is an idle, helpless, utterly dependent article of luxury. A man turns red at the thought of being such a thing, but he thoughtlessly accepts a pretty and fragile-looking woman in the same position as a charming natural picture. The Lady from the Sea feels an indefinite want in her life. She reads her want into all other lives and comes to the conclusion that man once had to choose whether he would be a land animal or a creature of the sea and that having chosen the land he has carried about with him ever since a secret sorrow for the element he has forsaken. The dissatisfaction that gnaws her is as she interprets it, this desperate longing for the sea. When her only child dies and leaves her without the work of a mother to give her a valid place in the world, she yields wholly to her longing and no longer cares for her husband, who, like Rosemary, begins to fear that she is going mad. At last, a seaman appears and claims her as his wife on the ground that they went years before through a rite which consisted of their marrying the sea by throwing their rings into it. This man, who had to fly from her in the old time because he killed his captain and who fills her with a sense of dread and mystery, seems to her to embody the attraction which the sea has for her. She tells her husband that she must go away with the seaman. Naturally, the doctor expostulates, declares that he cannot, for her own sake, let her do so mad a thing. She replies that he can only prevent her by locking her up and asks him what satisfaction it will be to him to have her body under lock and key whilst her heart is with the other man. In vain, he urges that he will only keep her under restraint until the seaman goes, that he must not, dare not, allow her to ruin herself. Her argument remains unanswerable. The seaman openly declares that she will come so that the distracted husband asks him, does he suppose he can force her from her home? To this the seaman replies that on the contrary, unless she comes of her own free will, there is no satisfaction to him in her coming at all. The unanswerable argument again. She echoes it by demanding her freedom to choose. Her husband must cry off his law-made and church-made bargain, renounce his claim to the fulfillment of her vows and leave her free to go back to the sea with her old lover. Then the doctor, with a heavy heart, drops his prait about his heavy responsibility for her actions and throws the responsibility on her by crying off as she demands. The moment she feels herself a free and responsible woman, all her childish fancies vanish. The seaman becomes simply an old acquaintance whom she no longer cares for and the doctor's affection produces its natural effect. In short, she says no to the seaman and takes over the housekeeping keys from her stepdaughter without any further speculations concerning that secret sorrow for the abandoned sea. It should be noted here that Alida, the lady from the sea, appears a much more fantastic person to English readers than to Norwegian ones. The same thing is true of many other characters drawn by Ibsen, notably Pierre Ghent, who, if born in England, would certainly not have been a poet and metaphysician as well as a black guard and a speculator. The extreme type of Norwegian, as depicted by Ibsen, imagines himself doing wonderful things but does nothing. He dreams as no Englishman can dream and drinks to make himself dream the more until his effective will is destroyed and he becomes a broken-down, disreputable sot carrying about the tradition that he is a hero and discussing himself on that assumption. Although the number of persons who dawdle their life away over fiction in England must be frightful and is probably increasing, yet we have no Ulrich Brendels, Rosmers, Alidas, Pierre Ghentz, nor anything at all like them. And it is for this reason that I am disposed to fear that the woman and the lady from the sea will always be received much more incredulously by English audiences than a doll's house and the place in which the leading figures are men and women of action. End of Section 14 Section 15 of the Quintessence of Ibsenism This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Section 15 Hedda Gabler Hedda Gabler, the heroine after whom the last of Ibsen's place so far is named, has no ideals at all. She is a pure skeptic, a typical 19th century figure falling into the abyss between the ideals which do not impose on her and the realities which she has not yet discovered. The result is that she has no heart, no courage, no conviction. With great beauty and great energy she remains mean, envious, insolent, cruel in protest against others' happiness, a bully in reaction from her own cowardice. Hedda's father, a general, is a widower. She has the traditions of the military cased about her and these narrow her activities to the customary hunt for a socially and pecuniarily eligible husband. She makes the acquaintance of a young man of genius, who, prohibited by an ideal-ridden society from taking his pleasures except where there is nothing to restrain him from excess, is going to the bad in search of his good with the usual consequences. Hedda is intensely curious about the side of life which is forbidden to her and in which powerful instincts absolutely ignored and condemned by the society with which her intercourse is permitted to her, steal their satisfaction. An ardent intimacy springs up between the inquisitive girl and the rake. Whilst the general reads the paper in the afternoon, Lovebock and Hedda have long conversations in which she describes to her all his disreputable adventures. Although she is the questioner, she never dares to trust him. All the questions are indirect and the responsibility for his interpretations rests on him alone. Hedda has no conviction whatever that these conversations are disgraceful, but she will not have a fight with society on the point. Hypocrisy, the homage that truth pays to falsehood, is easier to face as far as she can see than ostracism. When he proceeds to make advances to her, Hedda has again no conviction that it would be wrong for her to gratify his instinct and her own, so that she is confronted with the alternative of sinning against herself and him, or sinning against social ideals in which she has no faith. Making the coward's choice, she carries it out with the utmost bravado, threatening Lovebock with one of her father's pistols and driving him out of the house with all that ostentation of outraged purity, which is the instinctive defence of women to whom chastity is not natural, much as libel actions are mostly brought by persons concerning whom libels are virtually, if not technically, justifiable. Hedda, deprived of her lover, now finds that a life of conformity without faith involves something more terrible than the utmost ostracism. To it, boredom. This scourge, unknown among revolutionists, is the cursed which makes the security of respectability as dust in the balance against the unflagging interest of rebellion, and which forces society to eke out its harmless resources for killing time by licensing gambling, gluttony, hunting, shooting, coursing and other vicious distractions for which even idealism has no disguise. These licenses, however, are only available for people who have more than enough money to keep up appearances with, and as Hedda's father is too poor to leave her much more than the case of pistols, her boredom is only mitigated by dancing, at which she gains much admiration but no substantial offers of marriage. At last she has to find someone to support her. A good-natured mediocrity of a professor is all that is to be had, and though she regards him as a member of an inferior class, and despises almost too loathing his family's circle of two affectionate aunts and the inevitable general-servant who has helped to bring him up, she marries him for demieu, and immediately proceeds to erect this prudent provision for her livelihood by accommodating his income to her expenditure instead of accommodating her expenditure to his income. Her nature so rebels against the whole sordid transaction that the prospect of bearing a child to her husband drives her almost frantic since it will not only expose her to the intimate solicitude of his aunts in the course of an arrangement of her health in which she can see nothing that is not repulsive and humiliating but will make her one of his family in earnest. To amuse herself in these galling circumstances she forms an underhand alliance with a visitor who belongs to her old set, an elderly gallant who quite understands how little she cares for her husband and proposes a menager droit to her. She consents to his coming there and talking to her as he pleases behind her husband's back but she keeps her pistols in reserve in case he becomes seriously imported. He, on the other hand, tries to get some hold over her by placing her husband under pecuniary obligations as far as he can do it without being out of pocket. And so, had as married life begins with only this gallant as a precaution against the most desperate tedium. Meanwhile, Lovbock is drifting to disgrace by the nearest way, through drink. In due time, he descends from lecturing at the university on the history of civilization to taking a job in an out-of-the-way place as tutor to the little children of Sheriff Elfstead. This functionary, on being left a widower with a number of children, marries their governess, finding that she will cost him less and be bound to do more for him as his wife. As for her, she is too poor to dream of refusing such a settlement in life. When Lovbock comes, his society is having to her. He does not dare to tell her about his dissipations, but he tells her about his unwritten books. She does not dare to remonstrate with him for drinking, but he gives it up as soon as he sees that it shocks her. Just as Mr. Fearing in Bunyan's story was in a way the bravest of the pilgrims, so this timid and unfortunate Mrs. Elfstead trembles her way to a point at which Lovbock, quite reformed, publishes one book, which makes him celebrated for the moment, and completes another, fair-copied in her handwriting, to which she looks for a solid position as an original thinker. But he cannot now stay tutoring Elfstead's children, so after he goes to town with his pockets full of the money the published book has brought him. Left once more in her old lonely plight, knowing that without her Lovbock will probably relapse into dissipation, and that without him her life will not be worth living, Mrs. Elfstead is now confronted on her own higher plane with the same alternative which Hedda encountered. She must either sin against herself and him, or against the institution of marriage under which Elfstead purchased his housekeeper. It never occurs to her even that she has any choice. She knows that her action will count as a dreadful thing, but she sees that she must go, and accordingly Elfstead finds himself without a wife and his children without a governess, and so disappears unpitted from the story. Now it happens that Hedda's husband, Jürgen Tesman, is an old friend and competitor for academic honors of Lovbock, and also that Hedda was a schoolfeller of Mrs. Elfstead, or Teya, as she had better now be called. Teya's first business is to find out where Lovbock is. For hers is no preconcerted elopement. She has her at a town to keep Lovbock away from the bottle, a design which she dare not hint at to himself. Accordingly, the first thing she does is to call on the Tesmans, who have just returned from their honeymoon to beg them to invite Lovbock to their house, so as to keep him in good company. They consent, with the result that the two pairs are brought together under the same roof, and the tragedy begins to work itself out. Hedda's attitude now demands a careful analysis. Lovbock's experience with Teya has enlightened his judgment of Hedda, and as he is, in his gifted way, an errant poseur and male coquette, he immediately tries to get on romantic terms with her, for have they not a past, by impressing her with the penetrating criticism that she is, and always was, a coward. She admits that the virtuous heroics with a pistol were pure cowardice, but she is still so void of any other standard of conduct than conformity to the conventional ideals that she thinks her cowardice consisted in not daring to be wicked. That is, she thinks that what she actually did was the right thing, and since she despises herself for doing it and feels that he also rightly despises her for it, she gets a passionate feeling that what is wanted is the courage to do wrong. This unlooked-for reaction of idealism, this monstrous but very common setting up of wrongdoing as an ideal, and of the wrongdoer as a hero or heroine qua wrongdoer, leads Hedda to conceive that when Lovbock tried to seduce her, she was a hero, and that in allowing Tea to reform him, he has played the recreant. In acting on this misconception, she is restrained by no consideration for any of the rest. Like all people whose lives are valueless, she has no more sense of the value of Lovbock's or Teasman's or Tea's lives than a railway shareholder has of the value of a shunters. She gratifies her intense jealousy of Tea by deliberately taunting Lovbock into breaking loose from her influence by joining a carouse at which she not only loses his manuscript, but finally gets into the hands of the police through behaving outrageously in the house of a disreputable woman, whom he accuses of stealing it, not knowing that it has been picked up by Teasman, and handed to Hedda for safekeeping. Now, to Hedda this bundle of paper in another woman's handwriting is the fruit of Lovbock's union with Tea. He himself speaks of it as their child. So, when he turns his despair to a romantic account by coming to the two women and making a tragic scene, telling Tea that he has cast the manuscript torn into a thousand pieces out upon the fjord, and then, when she is gone, telling Hedda that he has brought the child to a house of ill fame and lost it there, she, deceived by his posing and thirsting to gain faith in human ability from a heroic deed of some sort, makes him a present of one of her pistols, only begging him to do it beautifully, by which she means that he is to kill himself without spoiling his appearance. He takes it unblushingly and leaves her with the air of a man who is looking his last on earth. But the moment he is out of sight of his audience, he goes back to the house where he still supposes that the manuscript was lost and there he news the wrangle of the night before using the pistol to threaten the woman with the result that he gets shot in the abdomen, leaving the weapon to fall into the hands of the police. Meanwhile, Hedda deliberately burns the child, then comes her elderly gallant to tell her the true story of the heroic deed which Livbock promised her to do so beautifully and to make her understand that herself has now got her into his power by his ability to identify the pistol. She is either to be the slave of this man or else to face the scandal of the connection of her name at the inquest with a squalor debauch ending in a murder. Tier 2 is not crushed by Livbock's death. Ten minutes after she has received the news with a cry of heartfelt lost she sits down with Tesman to reconstruct their child from the old notes which she has preserved. Over the congenial task of collecting and arranging another man's ideas Tesman is perfectly happy and forgets his beautiful Hedda for the first time. Teya, the trembler, is still mistress of the situation holding the dead Livbock, gaining Tesman and leaving Hedda to her elderly admirer who smoothly remarks that he will answer for Mrs. Tesman not being bored whilst her husband is occupied with Teya and putting the pieces of the book together. However, he has again reckoned with our General Gabler's second pistol. She shoots herself then and there. And so the story ends. LibriVox.org Recording by Asterix The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw Section 16 The Moral of the Place In following this sketch of the plays written by Ibsen to illustrate his thesis that the real slavery of today is slavery to ideals of virtue it may be that readers who have conned Ibsen through idealist spectacles have wondered that I could so pervert the utterances of a great poet. Indeed, I know already that many of those who are most fascinated by the poetry of the plays will plead for any explanation of them rather than that given by Ibsen himself in the plainest terms through the mouths of Mrs. Alving, Relling and the rest. No great writer uses his skill to conceal his meaning. There is a tale by a famous Scotch storyteller which would have suited Ibsen exactly if he had hit on it first. Jeannie Deans, sacrificing her sister's life on the scaffold to her own ideal of duty is far more horrible than the sacrifice in Erasmus Holm and the Deus Ex Machina expedient by which Scott makes the end of his story agreeable is no solution of the moral problem raised but only a pure isle evasion of it. He undoubtedly believed that it was right that Effie should hang for the sake of Jeannie's ideals. Footnote The common-sense solution of the moral problem has often been delivered by acclamation in the theatre. Some sixteen or seventeen years ago I witnessed a performance of a melodrama founded on this story. After the painful trial scene in which Jeannie Deans condemns her sister to death by refusing to swear to a perfectly innocent fiction came a scene in the prison. If it had been me, said the jailer, I would have sworn a hole through an iron pot. The roar of applause which burst from the pit and gallery was thoroughly Ibsenite in sentiment. The speech, by the way, was a gag of the actors and is not to be found in the acting edition of the play. End of footnote. Consequently, if I were to pretend that Scott wrote the heart of Midlothian to show that people were led to do as mischievous, as unnatural, as murderous things by their religious and moral ideals as by their envy and ambition it would be easy to confute me from the pages of the book itself. But Ibsen has made his meaning no less plain than Scott's. If anyone attempts to maintain that ghosts is a polemic in favour of indissoluble monogamic marriage or that the wild duck was written to inculcate that truth should be told for its own sake, they must burn the text of the plays if their contention is to stand. The reason that Scott's story is tolerated by those who shrink from ghosts is not that it is less terrible but that Scott's views are familiar to all well-brought-up ladies and gentlemen whereas Ibsen's are, for the moment, so strange as to be almost unthinkable. He is so great a poet that the idealist finds himself in the dilemma of being unable to conceive that such a genius should have an ignoble meaning and yet equally unable to conceive his real meaning as otherwise than ignoble. Consequently he misses the meaning altogether in spite of Ibsen's explicit and circumstantial insistence on it and proceeds to interpolate a meaning which conforms to his own idea of nobility. Ibsen's deep sympathy with his idealist figures seems to countenance this method of making confusion. Since it is on the weaknesses of the higher types of character that idealism seizes, his examples of vanity, selfishness, folly, and failure are not vulgar villains but men who, in an ordinary novel or melodrama, would be heroes. His most tragic point is reached in the destinies of Brandt and Rosmer who drive those whom they love to death in its most wanton and cruel form. The ordinary Philistine commits no such atrocities. He marries the woman he likes and lives more or less happily ever after. But that is not because he is greater than Brandt or Rosmer but because he is less. The idealist is a more dangerous animal than the Philistine, just as a man is a more dangerous animal than a sheep. Though Brandt virtually murdered his wife I can understand many a woman comfortably married to an amiable Philistine reading the play and envying the victim her husband for when Brandt's wife, having made the sacrifice he has exacted, tells him that he was right, that she is happy now, that she sees God face to face but reminds him that whoso sees Jehovah dies he instinctively clasps his hands over her eyes and that action raises him at once far above the criticism that sneers at idealism from beneath instead of surveying it from the clear ether above which can only be reached through its mists. If in my account of the plays I have myself suggested false judgments by describing the errors of the idealist in the terms of the life they had risen above rather than in that of the life they fell short of I can only plead with but a moderate disrespect to a large section of my readers that if I had done otherwise I should have failed wholly to make the matter understood. Indeed the terms of the realist morality have not yet appeared in our living language and I have already in this very distinction between idealism and realism been forced to insist on a sense of these terms which had not Ibsen forced my hand I should perhaps have a conveyed otherwise so strongly does it conflict in many of its applications with the vernacular use of the words. This however was a trifle compared to the difficulty which arose when personal characters had to be described from our inveterate habit of labelling men with the names of their moral qualities without the slightest reference to the underlying will which sets these qualities in action. At a recent anniversary celebration of the Paris Commune of 1871 I was struck by the fact that no speaker could find a eulogy of the Federals which would not have been equally appropriate to the peasants of Lavendee who fought for their tyrants against the French revolutionists or to the Irishmen and Highlanders who fought for the stewards at the Boine or Culloden nor could the celebrators find any other adjectives for their favourite leaders of the Commune than those which had recently been liberally applied by all the journals to an African explorer whose achievements were just then held in the liveliest abhorrence by the whole meeting. The statements that the slain members of the Commune were heroes who died for a noble ideal would have left a stranger quite as much in the dark about them as the counterstatements, once common enough in middle-class newspapers that they were incendiaries and assassins. Our obituary notices are examples of the same ambiguity of all the public men lately deceased. None have been made more interesting by strongly marked personal characteristics than the late Charles Bradlow. He was not in the least like any other notable member of the House of Commons, yet when the obituary notices appeared with the usual string of qualities, eloquence, determination, integrity, strong common sense, and so on, it would have been possible by merely expunging all names and other external details from these notices to leave the reader entirely unable to say whether the subject of them was Mr Gladstone, Mr Morley, Mr Steadle, or anyone else no more like Mr Bradlow than Gary Baldi or the late Cardinal Newman, whose obituary certificates of morality might nevertheless have been reprinted almost verbatim for the occasion without any gross incongruity. Bradlow had been the subject of many sorts of newspaper notice in his time. Ten years ago, when the middle class has supposed him to be a revolutionist, the string of qualities which the press hung upon him were all evil ones, great stress being laid on the fact that, as he was an atheist, it would be an insult to God to admit him to Parliament. When he became apparent that he was a conservative force in politics, he, without any recantation of his atheism, at once had the string of evil qualities exchanged for a rosary of good ones, but it is hardly necessary to add that neither the old badge nor the new will ever give any inquirer the least clue to the sort of man he actually was. He might have been Oliver Cromwell or Watt Tyler or Jack Cade, Penn or Wilberforce or Wellington, the late Mr. Hamden of flat earth theory notoriety or Proudhon or the Archbishop of Canterbury for all the distinction that such labels could give him one way or the other. The worthlessness of these accounts of individuals is recognised in practice every day. It makes a stranger before a crowd with being a thief, a coward and a liar and the crowd will suspend its judgment until you answer the question, what's he done? Attempt to make a collation for him on the ground that he is an upright fearless, high-principled hero and the same question must be answered before a penny goes into the hat. The reader must, therefore, discount those partialities that I have permitted myself to express in telling the stories of the plays. They are as much beside the mark as any other example of the sort of criticism which seeks to create an impression favourable or otherwise to Ibsen by simply pasting his characters all over with good or bad conduct marks. If any person cares to describe Hedda Gabler as a modern Lucretia for her death to dishonour and Thea Elvested as an abandoned perjured strumpet who deserted the man she had sworn before her gone to love, honour and obey until her death, the play contains conclusive evidence establishing both points. If the critic goes on to argue that as Ibsen manifestly means to recommend Thea's conduct above Hedda's by making the end happier for her, that of the play is a vicious one. That, again, cannot be gained, said. If, on the other hand, ghosts be defended as the dramatic critic of Piccadilly lately did defend it because it throws into divine relief the beautiful figure of the simple and pious Pastor Mander's the fatal compliment cannot be parroted. When you have called Mrs. Alving an emancipated woman or an unprincipled one Alving a debauchee or a victim of society nor a fearless and noble-hearted woman or a shocking little liar and an unnatural mother Helmer a selfish hound or a model husband and father according to your bias you have said something which is at once true and false and in either case perfectly idle. The statement that Ibsen's plays have an immoral tendency is, in the sense in which it is used, quite true. Immorality does not necessarily imply mischievous conduct. It implies conduct, mischievous or not, which does not conform to current ideals. Since Ibsen has devoted himself almost entirely to showing that the spirit or will of man is constantly outgrowing his ideals and that, therefore, conformity to them is constantly producing results no less tragic than those which follow the violation of ideals which are still valid. The main effect of his plays is to keep before the public the importance of being always prepared to act immorally to remind men that they ought to be as careful how they yield to a temptation to tell the truth as to a temptation to hold their tongues and to urge upon women that the desirability of their preserving their chastity depends just as much on circumstances as the desirability of taking a cab instead of walking. He protests against the ordinary assumption that there are certain supreme ends which justify all means used to attain them and insists that every end shall be challenged to show that it justifies the means. Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices. Let none of them, says Ibsen, be placed above the obligation to prove that they are worth the sacrifices they demand and let every one refuse to sacrifice himself and others from the moment he loses his faith in the reality of the ideal. Of course, it will be said here by incorrigibly slip-shod of readers that this so far from being immoral is the highest morality and so, in a sense, it is. But I really shall not waste any further explanation on those who will neither mean one thing or another by a word nor allow me to do so. In short, then, among those who are not ridden by current ideals, no question as to the morality of Ibsen's plays will ever arise and among those who are so ridden his plays will seem immoral and cannot be defended against the accusation. There can be no question as to the effect likely to be produced on an individual by his conversion from the ordinary acceptance of current ideals as safe standards of conduct to the vigilant, open mindedness of Ibsen. It must at once greatly deepen the sense of moral responsibility. Before conversion the individual anticipates nothing worse in the way of examination at the judgment bar of his conscience than such questions as have you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have you attended church regularly? Paid your rates and taxes to Caesar and contributed in reason to charitable institutions? It may be hard to do all these things, but it is still harder not to do them as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred well know. And even a scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler or prostitute who must answer no all through the catechism. Substitute for such a technical examination one in which the whole point to be settled is guilty or not guilty. One in which there is no more and no less respect for chastity than for incontinence, for subordination than for rebellion, for legality than for illegality, for piety than for blasphemy. In short for the standard virtues than for the standard vices and immediately instead of lowering the moral standard by relaxing the tests of worth you raise it by increasing their stringency to a point at which no mere Phariseism or moral cowardice can pass them. Naturally, this does not please the Pharisee. The respectable lady of the strictest Christian principles who has brought up her children with such relentless regard to their ideal morality that if they have any spirit left in them by the time they arrive in their attendance, they use their liberty to rush deliriously to the devil. This unimpeachable woman has always felt it unjust that the respect she wins should be accompanied by deep-seated detestation, whilst the latest spiritual heiress of Nell Gwynn whom no respectable person dare bow to in the street is a popular idol. The reason is, though you may not know it, that Nell Gwynn is a better woman than she and the abolition of the idealist test which brings her out a worse one and its replacement by the realist test which would show the true relation between them would be a most desirable step forward in public morals especially as it would act impartially and set the good side of the Pharisee above the bad side of the Bohemian as ruthlessly as it would set the good side of the Bohemian above the bad side of the Pharisee. For as long as convention goes counter to reality in these matters people will be led into Hedda Gabler's era of making an ideal of vice. If we maintain the convention that the distinction between Catherine of Russia and Queen Victoria between Nell Gwynn and Mrs. Proudy is the distinction between a bad woman and a good woman we need not be surprised when those who sympathize with Catherine and Nell conclude that it is better to be a bad woman than a good one and go unrecklessly to conceive a prejudice against teatotalism and monogamy and a preposition in favour of alcoholic excitement and promiscuous amours. Ibsen himself is kinder to the man who has gone his own way as a rake and a drunkard than to the man who is respectable because he dare not be otherwise. We find that the franker and healthier a boy is the more certain is he to prefer pirates and highwaymen or do-mar musketeers to pillars of society as his favourite heroes of romance. We have already seen both Ibsenites and anti-Ibsenites who seem to think that the cases of Nora and Mrs. Elfstead are meant to establish a golden rule for women who wish to be emancipated the said golden rule being simply run away from your husband but in Ibsen's view of life that would come under the same condemnation as the conventional golden rule cleave to your husband until death do you part. Most people know of a case or two in which it would be wise for a wife to follow the example of Nora or even of Mrs. Elfstead but they must also know cases in which the results of such a course would be as tragicomic as those of Gregor's veil as attempt in the wild duck to do for the Echdahl household what Loner Hesel did for the Boenig household. What Ibsen insists on is that there is no golden rule that conduct must justify itself by its effect upon happiness and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal and since happiness consists in the fulfillment of the will which is constantly growing and cannot be fulfilled today under the conditions which secured its fulfillment yesterday he claims afresh the old protestant right of private judgment in questions of conduct as against all institutions the so-called protestant churches themselves included here I must leave the matter merely reminding those who may think that I have forgotten to reduce Ibsenism to a formula for them that its quintessence is that there is no formula End of section 16