i am afraid the interest of the world of native letters is not at this moment so great as to make us despise mere translation as an aid to curiosity. there is indeed no reason why we should forbear to say in advance what we are certain, every time, to say after (after the heat has cooled i mean:) namely, that nothing is easier to concede than that ibsen—contentious name!—would be much less remarked if he were one of a dozen. it is impossible, in london at least, to shut one’s eyes to the fact that if to so many ingenious minds he is a kind of pictorial monster, a grotesque on the sign of a side-show, this is at least partly because his form has a monstrous rarity. it is one of the odd things of our actual esthetics that the more theatres multiply the less any one reads a play—the less any one cares, in a word, for the text of the adventure. that no one ever does read a play has long been a commonplace of the wisdom of booksellers. ibsen, however, is a text, and ibsen is read, and ibsen contradicts the custom and confounds the prejudice; with the effect thereby, in an odd way, of being doubly an exotic. his violent substance imposes, as it were, his insidious form; it is not (as would have seemed more likely) the form that imposes the substance. mr. william archer has just published his version of “john gabriel borkman,” of which, moreover, french and german versions reach us at the same moment. there are therefore all the elements of a fresh breeze in the wind—one has already a sense as of a cracking of whips and a girding of loins. you may by this time be terribly tired of it all in america; but, as i mentioned a fortnight ago, we have had very recent evidence that languor here, in this connection, is by no means as yet the dominant note. it is not the dispute itself, however, that most interests me: let me pay it, for what it has been and what it still may be, the mere superficial tribute of saying that it constitutes one of the very few cases of contagious discussion of a matter not political, a question not of mere practice, of which i remember to have felt, in a heavy air, the engaging titillation. in london generally, i think, the wandering breath of criticism is the stray guest at the big party—the shy young man whom nobody knows. in this remarkable instance the shy young man has ventured to pause and hover, has lighted on a topic, introduced himself and, after a gasp of consternation in the company, seen a little circle gather round him. i can only speak as one of the little circle, testifying to my individual glee.
the author who at the age of seventy, a provincial of provincials, turns out “john gabriel” is frankly for me so much one of the peculiar pleasures of the day, one of the current strong sensations, that, erect as he seems still to stand, i deplore his extreme maturity and, thinking of what shall happen, look round in vain for any other possible source of the same kind of emotion. for ibsen strikes me as an extraordinary curiosity, and every time he sounds his note the miracle to my perception is renewed. i call it a miracle because it is a result of so dry a view of life, so indifferent a vision of the comedy of things. his idea of the thing represented is never the comic idea, though this is evidently what it often only can be for many of his english readers and spectators. comedy moreover is a product mainly of observation, and i scarcely know what to say of his figures except that they haven’t the signs. the answer to that is doubtless partly that they haven’t the english, but have the norwegian. in such a case one of the norwegian must be in truth this very lack of signs.
they have no tone but their moral tone. they are highly animated abstractions, with the extraordinary, the brilliant property of becoming when represented at once more abstract and more living. if the spirit is a lamp within us, glowing through what the world and the flesh make of us as through a ground-glass shade, then such pictures as little eyolf and john gabriel are each a chassez-croisez of lamps burning, as in tasteless parlours, with the flame practically exposed. there are no shades in the house, or the norwegian ground-glass is singularly clear. there is a positive odour of spiritual paraffin. the author nevertheless arrives at the dramatist’s great goal—he arrives for all his meagreness at intensity. the meagreness, which is after all but an unconscious, an admirable economy, never interferes with that: it plays straight into the hands of his rare mastery of form. the contrast between this form—so difficult to have reached, so “evolved,” so civilised—and the bareness and bleakness of his little northern democracy is the source of half the hard frugal charm that he puts forth. in the cold fixed light of it the notes we speak of as deficiencies take a sharp value in the picture. there is no small-talk, there are scarcely any manners. on the other hand there is so little vulgarity that this of itself has almost the effect of a deeper, a more lonely provincialism. the background at any rate is the sunset over the ice. well in the very front of the scene lunges with extraordinary length of arm the ego against the ego, and rocks in a rigour of passion the soul against the soul—a spectacle, a movement, as definite as the relief of silhouettes in black paper or of a train of eskimo dogs on the snow. down from that desolation the sturdy old symbolist comes this time with a supreme example of his method. it is a high wonder and pleasure to welcome such splendid fruit from sap that might by now have shown something of the chill of age. never has he juggled more gallantly with difficulty and danger than in this really prodigious “john gabriel,” in which a great span of tragedy is taken between three or four persons—a trio of the grim and grizzled—in the two or three hours of a winter’s evening; in which the whole thing throbs with an actability that fairly shakes us as we read; and in which, as the very flower of his artistic triumph, he has given us for the most beautiful and touching of his heroines a sad old maid of sixty. such “parts,” even from the vulgarest point of view, are borkman and ella rentheim.
