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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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Ibsen’s new drama.
By JAMES A. JOYCE.
Even to the uninterested bystander it must seem significant that the interest attached to this Norwegian has never flagged…It would appear as if the storm of fierce debate rarely broke in upon his wonderful calm.
TWENTY YEARS1 HAVE passed since Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House, thereby almost marking an epoch in the history of drama. During those years his name has gone abroad through the length and breadth of two continents, and has provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any other living man. He has been upheld as a religious reformer, a social reformer, a Semitic lover of righteousness, and as a great dramatist. He has been rigorously denounced as a meddlesome intruder, a defective artist, an incomprehensible mystic, and, in the eloquent words of a certain English critic, ‘a muck-ferreting dog’. Through the perplexities of such diverse criticism, the great genius of the man is day by day coming out as a hero comes out amid the earthly trials. The dissonant cries are fainter and more distant, the random praises are rising in steadier and more choral chaunt. Even to the uninterested bystander it must seem significant that the interest attached to this Norwegian has never flagged for over a quarter of a century. It may be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times. Not Rousseau; not Emerson; not Carlyle; not any of those giants of whom almost all have passed out of human ken. Ibsen’s power over two generations has been enhanced by his own reticence. Seldom, if at all, has he condescended to join battle with his enemies. It would appear as if the storm of fierce debate rarely broke in upon his wonderful calm. The conflicting voices have not influenced his work in the very smallest degree. His output of dramas has been regulated by the utmost order, by a clockwork routine, seldom found in the case of genius. Only once he answered his assailants after their violent attack on Ghosts. But from The Wild Duck to John Gabriel Borkman, his dramas have appeared almost mechanically at intervals of two years. One is apt to overlook the sustained energy which such a plan of campaign demands; but even surprise at this must give way to admiration at the gradual, irresistible advance of this extraordinary man. Eleven plays, all dealing with modern life, have been published. Here is the list: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and lastly — his new drama, published at Copenhagen, December 19th, 1899 — When We Dead Awaken. This play is already in process of translation into almost a dozen different languages — a fact which speaks volumes for the power of its author. The drama is written in prose, and is in three acts.
In short, there is something untrue lying at the root of their union. Meanwhile the guests of the hotel, who are taking the baths, pass out of the hotel porch on the right, chatting and laughing men and women. They are informally marshalled by the inspector of the baths. This person is an unmistakable type of the conventional official. He salutes Mr. and Mrs. Rubek, enquiring how they slept. Rubek asks him if any of the guests take their baths by night, as he has seen a white figure moving in the park during the night. Maja scouts the notion, but the inspector says that there is a strange lady, who has rented the pavilion which is to the left, and who is staying there, with one attendant — a Sister of Mercy. As they are talking, the strange lady and her companion pass slowly through the park and enter the pavilion. The incident appears to affect Rubek, and Maja’s curiosity is aroused.
While this misunderstanding is finding outlet in the foregoing conversation, the inspector, all at once, takes fright at some person who is approaching. He attempts to escape into the hotel, but the high-pitched voice of the person who is approaching arrests him.
With these words, uttered in strident tones, the second chief actor enters on the scene. He is described as a great bear-killer, thin, tall, of uncertain age, and muscular. He is accompanied by his servant, Lars, and a couple of sporting dogs. Lars does not speak a single word in the play. Ulfheim at present dismisses him with a kick, and approaches Mr. and Mrs. Rubek. He falls into conversation with them, for Rubek is known to him as the celebrated sculptor. On sculpture this savage hunter offers some original remarks.
This eccentric creature, perhaps by the force of his own eccentricity, has begun to weave a spell of enchantment about Maja. Each word that he utters tends to wrap the web of his personality still closer about her. The black dress of the Sister of Mercy causes him to grin sardonically. He speaks calmly of all his near friends, whom he has dispatched out of the world.
However, it turns out that by his nearest friends he means his dogs, and the minds of his hearers are put somewhat more at ease. During their conversation the Sister of Mercy has prepared a slight repast for her mistress at one of the tables outside the pavilion. The unsustaining qualities of the food excite Ulfheim’s merriment. He speaks with a lofty disparagement of such effeminate diet. He is a realist in his appetite.
On such half-gruesome, half-comic invitation Maja goes out with him, leaving her husband in the company of the strange lady who enters from the pavilion. Almost simultaneously the Professor and the lady recognize each other. The lady has served Rubek as model for the central figure in his famous masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection Day’. Having done her work for him, she had fled in an unaccountable manner, leaving no traces behind her. Rubek and she drift into familiar conversation. She asks him who is the lady who has just gone out. He answers, with some hesitation, that she is his wife. Then he asks if she is married. She replies that she is married. He asks her where her husband is at present.
Rubek begins to understand that there is some meaning hidden beneath these strange words. He begins to think seriously on himself, his art, and on her, passing in review the course of his life since the creation of his masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection Day’. He sees that he has not fulfilled the promise of that work, and comes to realize that there is something lacking in his life. He asks Irene how she has lived since they last saw each other. Irene’s answer to his query is of great importance, for it strikes the key note of the entire play.
In Irene’s allusion to her position as model for the great picture, Ibsen gives further proof of his extraordinary knowledge of women. No other man could have so subtly expressed the nature of the relations between the sculptor and his model, had he even dreamt of them.
Thinking deeper and deeper on himself and on his former attitude towards this woman, it strikes him yet more forcibly that there are great gulfs set between his art and his life, and that even in his art his skill and genius are far from perfect. Since Irene left him he has done nothing but paint portrait busts of townsfolk. Finally, some kind of resolution is enkindled in him, a resolution to repair his botching, for he does not altogether despair of that. There is just a reminder of the will-glorification of Brand in the lines that follow.
In fine, the two agree in deeming their present state insufferable. It appears plain to her that Rubek lies under a heavy obligation to her, and with their recognition of this, and the entrance of Maja, fresh from the enchantment of Ulfheim, the first act closes.
♦
IT IS EVIDENT, even from this mutilated account, that the first act is a masterly one. With no perceptible effort the drama rises, with a methodic natural ease it develops. The trim garden of the nineteenth-century hotel is slowly made the scene of a gradually growing dramatic struggle. Interest has been roused in each of the characters, sufficient to carry the mind into the succeeding act. The situation is not stupidly explained, but the action has set in, and at the close the play has reached a definite stage of progression.
The second act takes place close to a sanatorium on the mountains. A cascade leaps from a rock and flows in steady stream to the right. On the bank some children are playing, laughing and shouting. The time is evening. Rubek is discovered lying on a mound to the left. Maja enters shortly, equipped for hill-climbing. Helping herself with her stick across the stream, she calls out to Rubek and approaches him. He asks how she and her companion are amusing themselves, and questions her as to their hunting. An exquisitely humorous touch enlivens their talk. Rubek asks if they intend hunting the bear near the surrounding locality. She replies with a grand superiority.
She rallies him on the subject of the strange lady, and hints maliciously at the understanding between them. Rubek says that he was only an artist and that she was the source of his inspiration. He confesses that the five years of his married life have been years of intellectual famine for him. He has viewed in their true light his own feelings towards his art.
The all-important question of their mutual happiness is touched upon, and after a brisk discussion a tacit agreement to separate is effected. When matters are in this happy condition Irene is descried coming across the heath. She is surrounded by the sportive children and stays awhile among them. Maja jumps up from the grass and goes to her, saying, enigmatically, that her husband requires assistance to ‘open a precious casket’. Irene bows and goes towards Rubek, and Maja goes joyfully to seek her hunter. The interview which follows is certainly remarkable, even from a stagey point of view. It constitutes, practically, the substance of the second act, and is of absorbing interest. At the same time it must be added that such a scene would tax the powers of the mimes producing it. Nothing short of a complete realization of the two roles would represent the complex ideas involved in the conversation. When we reflect how few stage artists would have either the intelligence to attempt it or the powers to execute it, we behold a pitiful revelation.
In the interview of these two people on the heath, the whole tenors of their lives are outlined with bold steady strokes. From the first exchange of introductory words each phrase tells a chapter of experiences. Irene alludes to the dark shadow of the Sister of Mercy which follows her everywhere, as the shadow of Arnold’s unquiet conscience follows him. When he has half-involuntarily confessed so much, one of the great barriers between them is broken down. Their trust in each other is, to some extent, renewed, and they revert to their past acquaintance. Irene speaks openly of her feelings, of her hate for the sculptor.
Rubek’s transgression has indeed been great. Not merely has he possessed himself of her soul, but he has withheld from its rightful throne the child of her soul. By her child Irene means the statue. To her it seems that this statue is, in a very true and very real sense, born of her. Each day as she saw it grow to its full growth under the hand of the skilful moulder, her inner sense of motherhood for it, of right over it, of love towards it, had become stronger and more confirmed.
It is, in reality, because of her strong feelings that she has kept aloof from Rubek for five years. But when she hears now of what he has done to the child — her child — all her powerful nature rises up against him in resentment. Rubek, in a mental agony, endeavours to explain, while she listens like a tigress whose cub has been wrested from her by a thief.
With larger experience of life he has found it necessary to alter his ideal somewhat, he has made her child no longer a principal, but an intermediary figure. Rubek, turning towards her, sees her just about to stab him. In a fever of terror and thought he rushes into his own defence, pleading madly for the errors he has done. It seems to Irene that he is endeavouring to render his sin poetical, that he is penitent but in a luxury of dolour. The thought that she has given up herself, her whole life, at the bidding of his false art, rankles in her heart with a terrible persistence. She cries out against herself, not loudly, but in deep sorrow.
Rubek, in poetic absorption, has no reply, he is musing on the old, happy days. Their dead joys solace him. But Irene is thinking of a certain phrase of his which he had spoken unwittingly. He had declared that he owed her thanks for her assistance in his work. This has been, he had said, a truly blessed episode in my life. Rubek’s tortured mind cannot bear any more reproaches, too many are heaped upon it already. He begins throwing flowers on the stream, as they used in those bygone days on the lake of Taunitz. He recalls to her the time when they made a boat of leaves, and yoked a white swan to it, in imitation of the boat of Lohengrin. Even here in their sport there lies a hidden meaning.
While they are playing aimlessly, in a kind of childish despair, Ulfheim and Maja appear across the heath. These two are going to seek adventures on the high tablelands. Maja sings out to her husband a little song which she has composed in her joyful mood. With a sardonic laugh Ulfheim bids Rubek good-night and disappears with his companion up the mountain. All at once Irene and Rubek leap to the same thought. But at that moment the gloomy figure of the Sister of Mercy is seen in the twilight, with her leaden eyes looking at them both. Irene breaks from him, but promises to meet him that night on the heath.
♦
THE THIRD ACT takes place on a wide plateau, high up on the hills. The ground is rent with yawning clefts. Looking to the right, one sees the range of the summits half-hidden in the moving mists. On the left stands an old, dismantled hut. It is in the early morning, when the skies are the colour of pearl. The day is beginning to break. Maja and Ulfheim come down to the plateau. Their feelings are sufficiently explained by the opening words.
When Ulfheim will not cease his annoyances, Maja threatens to run over the crest of the neighbouring ridge. Ulfheim points out that she will dash herself to pieces. He has wisely sent Lars away after the hounds, that he may be uninterrupted. Lars, he says, may be trusted not to find the dogs too soon.
Maja, with enforced self-possession, tells him frankly what she thinks of him. Her uncomplimentary observations please the bearhunter very much. Maja requires all her tact to keep him in order. When she talks of going back to the hotel, he gallantly offers to carry her on his shoulders, for which suggestion he is promptly snubbed. The two are playing as a cat and a bird play. Out of their skirmish one speech of Ulfheim’s rises suddenly to arrest attention, as it throws some light on his former life.
As an exchange of confidence, Maja tells him her life in summary — and chiefly her married life with Professor Rubek. As a result, these two uncertain souls feel attracted to each other, and Ulfheim states his case in the following characteristic manner:
Maja, satisfied that in their vows there will be no promise on his part to show her all the splendours of the earth, or to fill her dwelling-place with art, gives a half-consent by allowing him to carry her down the slope. As they are about to go, Rubek and Irene, who have also spent the night on the heath, approach the same plateau. When Ulfheim asks Rubek if he and madame have ascended by the same pathway, Rubek answers significantly.
While the musketry of their wit is at work, the elements seem to feel that there is a mighty problem to be solved then and there, and that a great drama is swiftly drawing to a close. The smaller figures of Maja and Ulfheim are grown still smaller in the dawn of the tempest. Their lots are decided in comparative quiet, and we cease to take much interest in them. But the other two hold our gaze, as they stand up silently on the fjaell, engrossing central figures of boundless, human interest. On a sudden, Ulfheim raises his hand impressively towards the heights.
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AS HE CANNOT take more than one person at a time, Ulfheim promises to send aid for Rubek and Irene, and, seizing Maja in his arms, clambers rapidly but warily down the path. On the desolate mountain plateau, in the growing light, the man and the woman are left together — no longer the artist and his model. And the shadow of a great change is stalking close in the morning silence. Then Irene tells Arnold that she will not go back among the men and women she has left; she will not be rescued. She tells him also, for now she may tell all, how she had been tempted to kill him in frenzy when he spoke of their connection as an episode of his life.
But, says Rubek, our love is not dead in us, it is active, fervent and strong.
There are, moreover, the difficulties of their former lives. Even here, at the sublimest part of his play, Ibsen is master of himself and his facts. His genius as an artist faces all, shirks nothing. At the close of The Master Builder, the greatest touch of all was the horrifying exclamation of one without, ‘O! the head is all crushed in.’ A lesser artist would have cast a spiritual glamour over the tragedy of Bygmester Solness. In like manner here Irene objects that she has exposed herself as a nude before the vulgar gaze, that Society has cast her out, that all is too late. But Rubek cares for such considerations no more. He flings them all to the wind and decides.
Such is the plot, in a crude and incoherent way, of this new drama. Ibsen’s plays do not depend for their interest on the action, or on the incidents. Even the characters, faultlessly drawn though they be, are not the first thing in his plays. But the naked drama — either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is of far-reaching importance — this is what primarily rivets our attention. Ibsen has chosen the average lives in their uncompromising truth for the groundwork of all his later plays. He has abandoned the verse form, and has never sought to embellish his work after the conventional fashion. Even when his dramatic theme reached its zenith he has not sought to trick it out in gawds or tawdriness. How easy it would have been to have written An Enemy of the People on a speciously loftier level — to have replaced the bourgeois by the legitimate hero! Critics might then have extolled as grand what they have so often condemned as banal. But the surroundings are nothing to Ibsen. The play is the thing. By the force of his genius, and the indisputable skill which he brings to all his efforts, Ibsen has, for many years, engrossed the attention of the civilized world. Many years more, however, must pass before he will enter his kingdom in jubilation, although, as he stands to-day, all has been done on his part to ensure his own worthiness to enter therein. I do not propose here to examine into every detail of dramaturgy connected with this play, but merely to outline the characterization.
IN HIS CHARACTERS Ibsen does not repeat himself. In this drama — the last of a long catalogue — he has drawn and differentiated with his customary skill. What a novel creation is Ulfheim! Surely the hand which has drawn him has not yet lost her cunning Ulflleim is, I think, the newest character in the play. He is a kind of surprise-packet. It is as a result of his novelty that he seems to leap, at first mention, into bodily form. He is superbly wild, primitively impressive. His fierce eyes roll and glare as those of Yegof or Herne. As for Lars, we may dismiss him, for he never opens his mouth. The Sister of Mercy speaks only once in the play, but then with good effect. In silence she follows Irene like a retribution, a voiceless shadow with her own symbolic majesty.
Irene, too, is worthy of her place in the gallery of her compeers. Ibsen’s knowledge of humanity is nowhere more obvious than in his portrayal of women. He amazes one by his painful introspection; he seems to know them better than they know themselves.l Indeed, if one may say so of an eminently virile man, there is a curious admixture of the woman in his nature. His marvellous accuracy, his faint traces of femininity, his delicacy of swift touch, are perhaps attributable to this admixture. But that he knows women is an incontrovertible fact. He appears to have sounded them to almost unfathomable depths. Beside his portraits the psychological studies of Hardy and Turgenieff, or the exhaustive elaborations of Meredith, seem no more than sciolism. With a deft stroke, in a phrase, in a word, he does what costs them chapters, and does it better. Irene, then, has to face great comparison; but it must be acknowledged that she comes forth of it bravely. Although Ibsen’s women are uniformly true, they, of course, present themselves in various lights. Thus Gina Ekdal is, before all else, a comic figure, and Hedda Gabler a tragic one — if such old-world terms may be employed without incongruity. But Irene cannot be so readily classified; the very aloofness from passion, which is not separable from her, forbids classification. She interests us strangely — magnetically, because of her inner power of character However perfect Ibsen’s former creations may be, it is questionable whether any of his women reach to the depth of soul of Irene. She holds our gaze for the sheer force of her intellectual capacity. She is, moreover, an intensely spiritual creation — in the truest and widest sense of that. At times she is liable to get beyond us, to soar above us, as she does with Rubek. It will be considered by some as a blemish that she — a woman of fine spirituality — is made an artist’s model, and some may even regret that such an episode mars the harmony of the drama. I cannot altogether see the force of this contention; it seems pure irrelevancy. But whatever may be thought of the fact, there is small room for complaint as to the handling of it. Ibsen treats it, as indeed he treats all things, with large insight, artistic restraint, and sympathy. He sees it steadily and whole, as from a great height, with perfect vision and an angelic dispassionateness, with the sight of one who may look on the sun with open eyes. Ibsen is different from the clever purveyor.
Maja fulfills a certain technical function in the play, apart from her individual character. Into the sustained tension she comes as a relief. Her airy freshness is as a breath of keen air. The sense of free, almost flamboyant, life, which is her chief note, counter-balances the austerity of Irene and the dullness of Rubek. Maja has practically the same effect on this play, as Hilda Wangel has on The Master Builder. But she does not capture our sympathy so much as Nora Helmer. She is not meant to capture it.
Rubek himself is the chief figure in this drama, and, strangely enough, the most conventional. Certainly, when contrasted with his Napoleonic predecessor, John Gabriel Borkman, he is a mere shadow. It must be borne in mind, however, that Borkman is alive, actively, energetically, restlessly alive, all through the play to the end, when he dies; whereas Arnold Rubek is dead, almost hopelessly dead, until the end, when he comes to life. Notwithstanding this, he is supremely interesting, not because of himself, but because of his dramatic significance. Ibsen’s drama, as I have said, is wholly independent of his characters. They may be bores, but the drama in which they live and move is invariably powerful. Not that Rubek is a bore by any means! He is infinitely more interesting in himself than Torvald Helmer or Tesman, both of whom possess certain strongly-marl;ed characteristics. Arnold Rubek is, on the other hand, not intended to be a genius, as perhaps Eljert Lovborg is. Had he been a genius like Eljert he would have understood in a truer way the value of his life.l But, as we are to suppose, the facts that he is devoted to his art and that he has attained to a degree of mastery in it — mastery of hand linked with limitation of thought — tell us that there may be lying dormant in him a capacity for greater life, which may be exercised when he, a dead man, shall have risen from among the dead.
The only character whom I have neglected is the inspector of the baths, and I hasten to do him tardy, but scant, justice. He is neither more nor less than the average inspector of baths. But he is that.
So much for the characterization, which is at all times profound and interesting. But apart from the characters in the play, there are some noteworthy points in the frequent and extensive side- issues of the line of thought. The most salient of these is what seems, at first sight, nothing more than an accidental scenic feature. I allude to the environment of the drama. One cannot but observe in Ibsen’s later work a tendency to get out of closed rooms. Since Hedda Gabler this tendency is most marked. The last act of The Master Builder and the last act of John Gabriel Borkman take place in the open air. But in this play the three acts are al fresco. To give heed to such details as these in the drama may be deemed ultra-Boswellian fanaticism. As a matter of fact it is what is barely due to the work of a great artist. And this feature, which is so prominent, does not seem to me altogether without its significance.
Again, there has not been lacking in the last few social dramas a fine pity for men — a note nowhere audible in the uncompromising rigour of the early eighties. Thus in the conversion of Rubek’s views as to the girl-figure in his masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection Day’, there is involved an all-embracing philosophy, a deep sympathy with the cross-purposes and contradictions of life, as they may be reconcilable with a hopeful awakening — when the manifold travail of our poor humanity may have a glorious issue. As to the drama itself, it is doubtful if any good purpose can be served by attempting to criticize it. Many things would tend to prove this. Henrik Ibsen is one of the world’s great men before whom criticism can make but feeble show. Appreciation, hearkening is the only true criticism. Further, that species of criticism which calls itself dramatic criticism is a needless adjunct to his plays. When the art of a dramatist is perfect the critic is superfluous. Life is not to be criticized, but to be faced and lived. Again, if any plays demand a stage they are the plays of Ibsen. Not merely is this so because his plays have so much in common with the plays of other men that they were not written to cumber the shelves of a library, but because they are so packed with thought. At some chance expression the mind is tortured with some question, and in a flash long reaches of life are opened up in vista, yet the vision is momentary unless we stay to ponder on it. It is just to prevent excessive pondering that Ibsen requires to be acted. Finally, it is foolish to expect that a problem, which has occupied Ibsen for nearly three years, will unroll smoothly before our eyes on a first or second reading. So it is better to leave the drama to plead for itself. But this at least is clear, that in this play Ibsen has given us nearly the very best of himself. The action is neither hindered by many complexities, as in The Pillars of Society, nor harrowing in its simplicity, as in Ghosts. We have whimsicality, bordering on extravagance, in the wild Ulfheim, and subtle humour in the sly contempt which Rubek and Maj a entertain for each other. But Ibsen has striven to let the drama have perfectly free action. So he has not bestowed his wonted pains on the minor characters. In many of his plays these minor characters are matchless creations. Witness Jacob Engstrand, Tonnesen, and the demonic Molvik! But in this play the minor characters are not allowed to divert our attention.
On the whole, When We Dead Awaken may rank with the greatest of the author’s work — if, indeed, it be not the greatest. It is described as the last of the series, which began with A Doll’s House — a grand epilogue to its ten predecessors. Than these dramas, excellent alike in dramaturgic skill, characterization, and supreme interest, the long roll of drama, ancient or modern, has few things better to show.
♦
More: Maria Popov has written about Ibsen’s influence on Joyce in her ‘Brain Pickings‘ newsletter.
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Publication: Saturday, 16 June 2018, at 00:33.
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