The Ibsen Phenomenon

Ibsen and World Literature
by Brian Johnston

I. Ibsen and World Literature

In October 1891, in the formidable presence of Ibsen himself, Knut Hamsun delivered a mostly derogatory account of Ibsen’s career as a writer of social dramas that employed a simplistic psychology of ‘character types’. ‘‘What interests him above all are problems, individual and social problems…this man [Ibsen] is unconsciously a child of Norway, of the century, and of John Stuart Mill.’’1 Ibsen must have flinched at the attribution of Mill as his mentor – a philosopher he particularly detested. Equally galling, one imagines, was the imputation (obstinately persisting to this day) that he was a writer of social problem plays. In a spasm of contrition Hamsun added a codicil almost comically at odds with what went before, conceding Ibsen’s greatness and concluding, ‘‘Ibsen has done more than anybody to raise our literature from being a little Norwegian literature to being world literature.’’2

The odds against Ibsen becoming a major figure in world literature were formidable in the extreme. William Archer, one of the group of pioneers who made Ibsen a major force in the English-speaking world, himself wondered at the extent of Ibsen’s success on the European scene: ‘‘…his Dano-Norwegian language is spoken by some four and a half million people in all, and the number of foreigners who learn it is infinitesimal. The sheer force of his genius has broken this barrier of language…’’ 3 The young man from Skien who on April 13,1850 arrived in Christiania with the freshly published Catiline to his name, could hardly have dreamt – even with the unbounded optimism of youth – that one day another young genius, also destined to be a major figure of world literature, would survey Ibsen’s career and declare: ‘‘It may be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times.’’4

The standing of the drama in the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States was at its lowest. In Britain, the last new play of any significance to appear until the arrival of A Doll House in London in1889, was Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777) This was a century which saw the full flowering of the Romantic Movement in poetry and the arts, and the rise of the realistic novel as a major literary genre: yet no period in Europe has been at once so fertile in literature and so barren in a drama of world significance.

Ibsen is the first world-dramatist; that is, in the latter part of his career, the first dramatist conscious of addressing a world audience rather than a national one; whose plays, as soon as they appeared, were major cultural events in many countries. Of William Archer’s translation of John Gabriel Borkman George Bernard Shaw, with admittedly Shavian hyperbole, could declare:

Already Ibsen is a European power: this new play has been awaited for two years, and is now being discussed and assimilated into the consciousness of the age with an interest which no political or pontifical utterance can command. …Ibsen is translated promptly enough nowadays, yet no matter how rapidly the translation comes on the heels of the original, newspapers cannot wait for it: detailed accounts based on the Norwegian text, and even on stolen glimpses of the proof-sheets, fly through the world from column to column as if the play were an Anglo-American arbitration treaty.5

Ibsen’s volatile confrontation with the theatre of his time is one of the ironies of cultural history. His identity as a dramatist seemed programmed to repudiate, at every point, the medium he was intellectually to dominate. Although continually rejected and assailed by the public, reduced to poverty, in exile, he doggedly worked upon the debased condition of the theatre until he forged a modern drama for his own revolutionary artistic purpose. After his first major success, Brand (1866) at the age of 38, he kept up his contentious stance towards the world public, remaining a center of controversy until long after his death in 1906.

A vociferous dissenting view, not always of the thinking world, kept Ibsen at the storm center of the modern Kulturkampf that pitted mainstream opinion against a minority determined, with Ibsen, to move the boundary posts of cultural discourse. At first the controversy centered upon the ‘moral aspect’ of Ibsen’s art. Henry James commented on this feature of the controversy. In a review of Hedda Gabler, he noted ‘‘those cries of outraged purity which have so often and so pathetically resounded through the Anglo-Saxon world.’’ 6 The controversy reached fever pitch in London on Friday, 13th March, 1891, with the single performance of Ghosts, at J.T. Grein’s ‘Independent Theater’ - a private theater club brought into being to circumvent the censorship that banned public performances of the play – a ban that stayed in effect in Britain for nearly thirty years. Shaw wrote of the press reaction to the production:

There was one crowded moment when, after the first performance of ‘‘Ghosts,’’ the atmosphere of London was black with vituperation, with threats, with clamor for suppression and extinction, with everything that makes life worth living in modern society.7

William Archer collected the most extreme of the nearly universal expressions of outraged purity in an article, ‘Ghosts and Gibberings’ of which Henry James declared:

This catalogue is a precious document, one of those things that the attentive spirit would not willingly let die…for it illuminates, in this matter of the study of Ibsen the second characteristic of our emotion:8 the fact that that emotion is conspicuously and exclusively moral.9

Despite the almost universal outrage expressed in the London press, it now became apparent that a minority public was evolving hungry for a theatre into which one could take one’s intellect. This partly accounts for the astonishing success of Ibsen with the ‘thinking world’ when, beginning in the 1880’s, his plays began to appear on the European stage. Ibsen offered a drama that was in tune with the leading ideas and artistic achievements of the time. This minority public was a highly critical, often rebellious intelligentsia variously at odds with the aesthetic, moral, political and religious premises of conventional society. Ibsen’s dramas addressed all levels of this cultural alienation. Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce in Britain, and Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hoffmansthal on the continent were among the many who took up the cause of Ibsen and what became known as the ‘New Drama’. A minority theatre, the cradle of serious modern drama, came into being in Berlin (the Freie Bühne, 1889) and London (the Independent Theatre 1891) specifically to perform Ibsen’s Ghosts. In Paris, André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887, performed Ghosts in 1890. George Moore, sitting in the audience, was so moved by the play he became a founding member of a new Irish Literary Theatre—later to become Ireland’s Abbey Theatre.

The Ibsen phenomenon was the confirmation that theater and drama now joined the other arts and literatures of the modern world in addressing separate, and often mutually hostile mainstream and minority publics. The banning of public performances of Ghosts in Europe and the hostility with which practically each new play was greeted by reviewers in the popular press and mainstream criticism resembled the outrage that greeted the work of Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola; or the reception accorded to Edouard Manet and the Impressionists painters. Theater managers pursuing the highly lucrative policy of appealing to all levels of society in their audiences, were hostile to this development.. They were as anxious as the government censors to keep out controversial and socially divisive drama. Ibsen was a major threat to the careful consensus theater anxious to present a theatrical fare that appealed to all levels from stalls to the upper circles.

Ibsen’s plays not only were controversial, they also were aesthetically compelling, capable of luring a discriminating minority away from the mainstream theatre. Until the ranks of this discriminating public increased, however, there existed a notable disparity between Ibsen’s social impact and growing intellectual esteem in the cultural life of Britain and continental Europe and the actually meager financial rewards accompanying that success. As Michael Meyer estimated:

The decade from 1881 to 1890, which was to see the composition of Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler was to bring [Ibsen] a total income of under 6,500 pounds – less than playwrights of far inferior stature in larger countries…would expect to make in a single year.10

However, this lack of financial reward actually increased Ibsen’s indispensable role in bringing about the new drama. Few dramatists in the countries where Ibsen’s plays were introduced could have settled for such modest returns; but without the drama he brought into being the minority theater would have had no consistently compelling work to present and no gradually emerging public receptive to it. The future of a serious modern drama practically lay with Ibsen and his determined pursuit of his art.

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1 (Reprinted in Paa Turne´,Oslo 1960) in Henrik Ibsen: A Critical Anthology, Edited
by James MacFarlane, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,Ltd. 1970) 142
2 Ibid. 145
3 William Arc her on Ibsen, Ed. Thomas Postlewait (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1984), 55
4 James Joyce, ‘‘Ibsen’s New Drama,’’ Fortnightly Review 73 (April 1, 1900): 575–90
5 George Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions II. (New York: Brentano’s 1928) 158
6 Henry James, ‘‘On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler’’ (1891), in The Scenic Art (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1948), 245
7 Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions, (New York: Brentano’s 1928) I. .55
8 The first characteristic being that emotion’s peculiar intensity.
9 Henry James, ‘‘On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler’’ (1891), in The Scenic Art (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1948), 245
10 Michael Meyer, Ibsen, A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 472